Therapy for Living with Chronic Illness
Support for the grief, pacing and medical trauma that come with long-term illness
Chronic illness means explaining yourself, a lot, to many different people. To doctors. To family. To people at work who mean well. To yourself, at three in the morning, trying to work out whether you are making too much of this and googling your symptoms.
Living with a chronic illness asks something of you that most people never see. The appointments and the medications are only part of it. Underneath sits the harder work — grieving a body that used to do more, making decisions with incomplete information, staying close to people when you cannot be as available as you want to be, and holding on to a sense of who you are while your health keeps changing the terms.
That is the work I do here.
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Autoimmune disorders, long COVID, Lyme disease, MCAS, POTS and dysautonomia, and the conditions that took years to name. If you have heard “you look fine,” “it’s not really that serious,” or spent a long stretch being told your labs were normal while you knew something was wrong, you already know that being disbelieved leaves its own mark. That mark is treatable.
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Pain conditions, ME/CFS, fibromyalgia, hypermobility, migraine, endometriosis, and chronic pelvic pain. Therapy here is not about proving the pain is in your head — it is not. It is about pacing without guilt, negotiating with a body that gives you a different budget every morning, and the particular grief of cancelling things you wanted to do.
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Digestive conditions, liver disease, endocrine disorders, asthma and allergies, obstructive sleep apnea. Conditions you manage rather than finish treating — the appointment load, the decisions about medication, the restrictions other people find easy to forget, and the slow shift into being someone whose health takes up a permanent share of the week. These are not things you should have to hold quietly.
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Functional neurological disorder — including functional seizures, functional movement symptoms, and functional weakness — is real, common, and treatable, and it is a particular area of focus for me. If you have been given this diagnosis and left without much explanation of what to do next, you are in the right place.
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If you are the one driving to appointments, tracking medications, and holding the household steady, the toll on you is real even though the diagnosis is not yours. Caregivers are often the last people to get support and the first to run out of room. You are welcome here in your own right.
Anxiety, chronic worry, and panic
Depression or low mood
Stress and burnout
OCD and intrusive thoughts
Phobias and avoidance patterns
Perfectionism and self-criticism
Sleep difficulties
Emotional overwhelm or difficulty managing reactions
Unhelpful thinking patterns that keep you stuck
Who this is for?
Grief for the life, body, or plans you expected.
Medical trauma: the diagnosis, the ER visit, the doctor who did not listen. These are treatable.
Anxiety about symptoms, results, flares, and what comes next.
Pacing and self-invalidation: stopping before you crash, and what it costs to argue with your own body.
Communication and boundaries, with doctors, employers, partners and family.
Identity: building a life around what still matters, not what you have lost.
What would we work on?
How would we address these issues?
Therapy should feel both supportive and useful. In practice, that means we spend time on how you feel and on what you are going to do about it. Sessions may include:
Often the backbone of this work. It is built for exactly this situation — circumstances you cannot change by wanting them to change — and it focuses on building a life that still moves toward what matters to you, with the illness present rather than resolved.
Contributes the practical skills. Distress tolerance for getting through flares without making it worse. Emotion regulation for riding the waves of the tough emotions. Radical acceptance for stopping fighting reality, so your energy can go towards change instead.
For the medical trauma underneath. If a hospital hallway, a particular smell, or the memory of being told to calm down still lands in your body before you have had a thought about it, that is a treatable target, and we do not have to retell the whole story in detail.
Working alongside your medical team
You may already have a rheumatologist, a gastroenterologist, a neurologist, an allergist, a pain specialist, a primary care doctor, or all of the above. With your written permission I can coordinate with them, so that your care is joined up rather than duplicated.
I do not diagnose or treat the medical condition itself. What I bring is a clinician who understands the shape of the thing and will not need it explained from scratch every session.
Practical things that matter when you are unwell
Sessions are available online as well as in person, which matters on the days when leaving the house is the whole problem. Telehealth is available across all eight states where I am licensed — Virginia, DC, Maryland, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Delaware, Illinois, and Florida.
You are welcome to attend from bed, from a recliner, with the lights low, or in your comfy clothes. While being on camera is required, sitting upright for fifty minutes is not needed to do quality work.
I see clients in person in Ashburn and online, and we can move between the two as your health requires rather than committing to one.
This is not only professional territory for me. I do not need persuading.
It is part of why I am so invested in this work — I understand the toll from the inside, and I know how much room there still is for things to get better. It also means you will not spend your first sessions convincing me that any of this is real.
A note from me
Ready to begin?
Taking the first step is the hardest — and the most important.
A free 15-minute consultation, no pressure, no commitment.
Schedule a consultation today.