Many of the people I work with are high achievers. They might be capable, accomplished, or the person everyone else relies on. They've worked hard to build a life that looks like it's working seamlessly. but underneath that, there's an exhaustion that's hard to explain to people who haven't felt it. There’s a sense that no matter how much they do or achieve, it's never quite enough.

A lot of that makes sense when you look at where it came from. Many of my clients grew up with parents who, for whatever reason (their own unresolved pain, mental health struggles, addiction) weren't able to show up in the ways they needed. So they learned early that love and belonging had to be earned. That needing things was dangerous. That the safest thing was to be useful, capable, and undemanding. Those patterns made sense once, and now they show up everywhere. In relationships, in work, in how hard it is to rest, to ask for help, to ask for your needs to be met.

They've spent their lives feeling like they're too much or not enough, sometimes both at once. They worry about being a burden. They take on other people's needs before their own without even realising they're doing it. They react in ways they don't understand and then spend hours picking it apart. And they've gotten so good at keeping the mask on that taking it off, even in a therapy room, can feel almost impossible.

You don't need to come in with the right words, the right answers, or a clear sense of what your trauma even is. You don't need to perform wellness or have it figured out. You just need to show up, as you are, wherever that is.

A note on whether your experiences "count": many of the people I work with wonder if what they've been through is “bad enough” to come to therapy, or if they even have the right to call it trauma. In my experience, when we actually look at the full picture, the answer is almost always yes. You don't need to have the darkest story in the room for your pain to be real, or to deserve real support.