Michelle Granden (she/her)

Women's lives are shaped by forces that often go unexamined: hormonal and reproductive transitions, cultural expectations about who you should be and what you should need, and roles that ask you to hold things together for everyone else. I work with the psychological weight of all of it—including infertility and loss, motherhood, and midlife reckoning. Much of the work is discerning what's yours to carry and what you were handed, and finding your way back to wanting things at all.

Some anxiety arrives with a clear cause. The kind I most often work with doesn't. It has hummed along for years, so constant it can fee like personality rather than symptom: the part of you that anticipates, analyzes, second-guesses, prepares. Rather than treating it as a problem to eliminate, we look at what it has been protecting, what it has helped you do, and what it has cost you. Understanding what a pattern was for is where the freedom to respond differently begins.

Existential therapy takes seriously that a life can be materially fine and still feel empty. We look at the whole shape of a life—the questions of meaning and direction that live beneath the day-to-day, the choices you're making, including the ones you don't experience as choices at all. Your symptoms and old patterns aren't evidence of brokenness; they're adaptations that once made sense. Seeing them clearly is where the freedom to do something differently begins.

Depth work means we don't stay only on the surface of what's wrong. Symptom relief is real and often comes—but managing a symptom can leave its source untouched, so it returns, or moves, or trades itself for another. Instead of stopping at what hurts, we stay with it long enough to understand what it's for: what it's protecting, what it's been standing in for, what it might be asking you to notice. Often the pattern leads somewhere older, to where who you are first took shape.

ACT pairs well with depth work because it asks a practical question alongside the deeper one: not just where does this come from, but what do you want to do with what you now understand? We work on relating differently to anxiety and difficult thoughts rather than trying to eliminate them completely, and on clarifying what actually matters to you, then taking steps in that direction even when the discomfort comes along for the ride.

Burnout in the people I work with rarely looks like collapse. It looks like continuing to function—meeting expectations, thinking ahead, taking care of what needs taking care of—while feeling less and less at home in the life you're managing. We look at what's driving the over-functioning, what it's protecting, and what it would mean to set some of it down. The goal isn't a better system for holding it all together. It's a life that doesn't require quite so much holding.