Hi… I’m happy you found your way to my website. I know finding a therapist can be hard these days, and I admire anyone who keeps at it until they find the right person. I may, or may not, be that right-fit person for you, so here are a few initial questions.

Are you suffering from feelings you don’t understand? Are your relationships strained? Are you feeling fearful all the time? Are you feeling a sense of sorrow or emptiness that you can’t shake? If any of these things are true for you, I can probably help.

Sources of emotional pain are often related to trauma, past and present. Trauma, of course, comes in all shapes and sizes. Recovering from it is painful, but not nearly as painful as not recovering. We do all kinds of dysfunctional things to avoid our emotional pain but, mostly, we get scared or deeply sad and often stay that way until we get a little help. Other words for staying scared or deeply sad are anxiety and depression, both of which can drain all the pleasure from our lives.

Maybe there’s nothing going on that you would label as trauma, but you still feel bad. Being alive is hard. People we love die, get sick or injured. Sometimes we’re the ones looking at our own death, our own illness or injury. Our relationships go south. And, of course, there’s the continuing collective backlash from having lived through a pandemic. The world feels more dangerous now. And maybe it is dangerous. In times like this, knowing what we feel and why we feel it is essential to our mental health, especially if we can communicate these things to the people we love.

I’m a licensed clinical social worker who’s been in private practice for over thirty years. I encourage emotional growth and healing by examining your experiences, teaching you to define how you feel, and teaching you tools that you can lean on when emotional pain and suffering knocks on your door. Suffering is a sign in the road of our lives. I can help you learn to read yours partly because of my life experience and training but, also because of my committed belief in the healing power of self-knowledge.

If you’re interested in exploring what’s troubling you, I’d love to assist you. Together we can figure out just about anything.

Julianna Waters, LCSW