Michelle Langley LPC

Existential therapy takes seriously that some distress isn't a symptom to be removed. It's concerned with how we show up in the world: questions of meaning, freedom, responsibility, and who you are becoming. These come up honestly through life transitions, and they deserve real attention rather than a technique. In practice this means I don't rush to fix. We look at what your life is actually asking of you, what you've been avoiding deciding, and what you want the next part built around.

How you learned to get your needs met early becomes the template for how you read closeness and conflict later. Attachment work looks at those patterns as they operate now: what makes you pull back, and what you expect from people before they've done anything. The therapy relationship is part of this. What happens between us is information about what happens everywhere else. Naming the pattern is usually what starts to loosen it.

EMDR uses bilateral stimulation while you hold a distressing memory in mind, which lets the brain reprocess an experience that got stored without resolution. It isn't talk therapy and it doesn't require you to narrate the worst of it. What usually changes is the charge: the memory stays, and it stops firing in the present. I use it where something specific is stuck, and I pace it carefully. Preparation and nervous system stability come before any reprocessing.

A significant part of my practice is women in perimenopause and after. The menopausal transition changes how the nervous system regulates anxiety, sleep, and emotional reactivity, and those symptoms get treated as psychological without anyone asking what the body is doing. I'm the author of Menopause Is Not a Mood. The work considers physiology alongside the psychological picture, and when something needs a medical workup, I coordinate with your providers.

Anxiety that shows up as racing thoughts, sleep that won't hold, a body braced for something it can't name. Most people arrive having already tried to manage it and wanting to know why it's there. We look at what's driving it: patterns shaped by trauma, what's happening in relationships, and physiological changes that get overlooked. The work is identifying the source rather than only quieting the symptom, and building capacity that holds when things get hard again.

PTSD keeps an event in the present tense. Intrusive memories, nightmares, hypervigilance, and avoiding anything that might set it off. The body responds as though the threat is current, which is exhausting and difficult to explain to people who weren't there. I work with EMDR and somatic regulation, and I pace it carefully. Stabilization comes first, so you have the capacity to stay present before we go near the material. The goal is that the memory stops running your daily life.