Therapy for Women Navigating Perimenopause, Menopause, and Chronic Illness
In-person sessions in Manzanita Oregon, and telehealth sessions available throughout Oregon and Washington.
Support for women in the midst of change
The hormonal shifts of perimenopause and menopause, a chronic health diagnosis, or cancer treatment all ask you to change. Sleep, mood, memory, and energy shift; anxiety, depression, or grief may surface; and your sense of self can begin to feel unfamiliar. Night sweats that wake you affect your mood the next day. A diagnosis changes your relationships and how you imagine your future. The messages you absorbed about aging, productivity, and what a woman’s body should be shape how you meet all of it. You could feel lost, and confused and really tired of not feeling yourself.
I work from a bio-psycho-social-cultural understanding of women’s health, which means all of you is welcome, and every part of your experience helps shape your roadmap to care. Together we look at the whole picture, pairing evidence-based approaches with depth work and mindfulness so that care reaches all aspects of you.
When the life you built no longer fits
Something often shifts beneath the surface during these years. The life you worked hard to build may start to feel like it belongs to an earlier version of you, and questions emerge. What do I actually want? What have I been carrying that was never mine? Who am I becoming as my body changes? For many women, the physical changes of midlife and chronic illness come with an equally real psychological rite of passage that asks for attention and understanding. Depth work and mindfulness makes room to process and grieve what is ending, and to reclaim parts of yourself that were dormant. Depth work makes room to grieve what is ending and to reclaim the parts of yourself that went quiet, so that who you are becoming can finally be heard.
You belong here
Tap each to learn more
-
The years leading up to menopause can be some of the most disorienting of a woman's life, and among the least talked about. Your sleep is disrupted. Your mood shifts in ways that feel unfamiliar. You may be experiencing anxiety, depression, rage, tears, grief, or a strange sense of losing yourself. What's happening hormonally is real and so is what's happening emotionally and psychologically beneath it.
Hormonal changes, whether from perimenopause, PCOS, PMDD, menopause, hysterectomy, oophorectomy, cancer treatment, or other causes, don't just affect the body. They reshape the inner landscape too. Your emotional responses may feel disproportionate, your sense of who you are less certain, and the things that once anchored you may not be working the same way. This work holds all of it.
-
More physical changes to navigate. Often treated as an ending, but many women find it is also an unraveling revelation of old roles, old identities, old ways of moving through the world.
Whether you're navigating the physical changes, the emotional weight, or the deeper questions this passage raises about who you are and what comes next, this work meets you in the fullness of that passage, not just the symptoms, but the identity, the grief, and the possibilities that menopause can bring into view.
-
Depression during perimenopause, menopause, and other hormonal changes, often looks different from what most people picture. A flatness that settles in without warning, loss of pleasure in things that used to matter, tearfulness that feels disproportionate, or a heaviness that doesn't lift even when life looks fine on the outside. Fluctuating estrogen and progesterone directly affect serotonin, dopamine, and GABA, the brain's primary mood-regulating systems. This is not weakness, and you are not imagining it.
-
The worry that won't quiet down. The sense that you are always bracing for something. The emotional reactivity that surprises you. Anxiety in midlife often runs deeper than circumstance. It lives in the nervous system, in old protective patterns, in a body that has been on alert for a long time. We work with it as information, not just something to manage.
-
A serious health diagnosis changes everything. Not just medically, but in how you understand time, your body, your relationships, and yourself. Whether you are navigating an autoimmune condition, a cancer diagnosis, a complex chronic illness, or a condition that medicine hasn't fully explained or named yet, you are dealing with something that affects the whole of your life.
The physical reality is hard enough. But the emotional weight of the grief, the fear, the identity questions, the unpredictability, the impact on relationships and sense of future, deserves its own space too. Living in a body that feels like it's working against you, or that has become suddenly unfamiliar, is a particular kind of disorientation that standard therapy rarely addresses directly.
Whether you are newly diagnosed, in active treatment, having a flare, in remission, or learning to live with an ongoing condition, this work meets you where you are. When appropriate, I collaborate with your healthcare team to support a more integrated picture of your care. You don't have to manage this alone.
-
Grief doesn't only follow death. It follows the end of relationships, the departure of children, the loss of a career or identity, the body you used to have, the future you imagined. Midlife often brings multiple losses arriving at once. This work creates space to grieve what is ending and to find what might be beginning.
-
You feel things deeply. Sometimes you wonder if it’s too deeply. You feel and absorb the emotions of people around you, are easily overwhelmed by noise, conflict, or sensory input, and may have spent years wondering why everything seems to affect you more than it does others. High sensitivity is not a flaw. It is a superpower, a way of being that deserves attuned, thoughtful support.
-
Something has shifted beneath the surface. The life you worked hard to build may feel like it no longer fits. You find yourself asking questions you haven't asked before, about purpose, choices, authenticity, personal agency, what you actually want, and the true self you are becoming now. This is not a crisis. It is an invitation, a rite of passage.
-
Trauma-informed, and neurodivergent-sensitive support for those who have experienced past trauma and are in a place of relative stability. This is health, depth, and mindfulness focused support. Together we explore how past experiences shape present patterns, relationships, and the nervous system.
This work is best suited for those not currently in active crisis or acute danger.