Hilary Kopple LCSW

Self-esteem issues in my clients rarely look like low confidence. They look like a persistent feeling of not enough, despite real accomplishment. I work with adults who achieve consistently and still cannot access a settled sense of their own worth, often because that worth was conditional growing up. We work at the level of the pattern, not just the thought, using CBT, IFS, and somatic therapy together.

Many of my clients repeat relationship patterns they can see clearly and still cannot seem to shift, often people pleasing, overgiving, or staying quiet to keep the peace. These patterns usually trace back to a difficult family dynamic where that behavior once made sense. I help you understand where the pattern started and build the capacity to relate differently, using IFS and somatic therapy alongside CBT.

I work with adults whose anxiety does not look like panic from the outside. It looks like overthinking, overfunctioning, and a mind that will not fully turn off. Many of my clients are high achieving and used to holding things together for everyone else, which makes the anxiety easy to hide and hard to name. I use CBT, IFS, and somatic therapy to work with the thoughts, the patterns, and where the anxiety lives in the body, not just the surface symptoms.

Many of my clients are highly capable at managing their thoughts and still carry stress and old patterns in the body, showing up as tension, fatigue, or a nervous system that will not settle. I use Sensorimotor Psychotherapy to work with what talking alone has not fully reached. This is especially useful for clients navigating relational trauma or a difficult family of origin, where the pattern is often held physically as much as cognitively.

IFS is central to how I work with clients whose patterns feel stuck even when they understand them intellectually. It helps you understand why a part of you overfunctions, people pleases, or stays anxious, usually because that part learned to protect you at some point, often in a difficult family dynamic. We work with those patterns directly rather than only talking about them, which tends to create change that actually holds.

I use CBT to help clients notice the automatic thoughts driving anxiety and self-criticism, then build the ability to question them in real time. For high achieving clients especially, CBT gives concrete tools for a mind that will not stop analyzing. Depending on what a client is looking for, I may use it as a primary approach or integrate it with IFS and somatic work to address the thought, the underlying pattern, and the body together.