Cathryn Bousquet

Anxiety often shows up alongside grief and trauma, and it's a large part of what I see. The bracing, the replaying, the sense that if you stop scanning for the next bad thing you'll be caught off guard. I use CBT-informed tools for the patterns that respond to structure and practice, and internal family systems work for the anxiety that's protecting something older. Both matter. I'm interested in what your anxiety has been doing for you before we work on quieting it.

I've sat with sudden death, anticipated death, and losses that don't get a funeral: a diagnosis, an estrangement, a version of your life that ended without anyone marking it. I don't work from stages, and I don't have a timeline for you.

I'm not startled by what you tell me, and I won't push you to give me the whole story before you're ready. You decide what we open and when. We move at the pace that keeps you steady in your life outside of the session.

Most people arrive with a story about themselves that someone else helped write. That they're too much, that they should be over it, that what happened was their fault. Narrative work means treating that story as something we can examine together rather than as a fact about you. I ask a lot of questions. I'm interested in the parts that got left out, who benefits from the version you've been carrying, and what becomes possible if it isn't the only account available.

IFS starts from the idea that the parts of you that seem to be getting in the way are usually trying to protect you, and they learned to do it for a reason. Rather than fighting the anxious part, the numb part, or the part that pushes people away, I'm curious about what it's guarding and how long it's been working that hard. Clients often find this a relief. It means we can be interested in your patterns instead of treating them as evidence that something is wrong with you.

This is the base of how I work. You're the authority on your own experience, and my job is to stay close to it rather than steer you toward what I think you should conclude. That shows up in what I don't do: I don't arrive with an agenda for your session, I don't decide in advance what your experience should mean, and I won't tell you you're doing your grief or your recovery wrong. Four years of survivor advocacy taught me what happens when someone loses say over their own story.