Individual Therapy

You are the one who went looking for this. That is worth noticing before anything else happens.

Maybe your partner will not come. Maybe there is no partner right now, just a pattern that has followed you into every relationship you have started. Maybe the marriage ended and you are determined that the next one goes differently.

Whatever brought you here alone, this is not the lesser version of couples work. It is the part of it that was always yours.

Whitney Baker, LMFTA. Gottman-trained, attachment-based, thirteen years in mental health and social services.

"My partner won't go to therapy."

Then come without them. I mean that practically, not as a consolation prize.

A relationship pattern takes two people to run. Which means one person changing their side of it reliably changes the whole thing. When the pursuit softens, the withdrawal has less to push against. When the withdrawal stays present, the pursuit has less to chase. Your partner does not have to believe in therapy for this to work. They only have to be in a relationship with someone whose moves are changing.

Sometimes they get curious eventually and come in. Sometimes they never do and things still get better. Both of those count.

Be calm. Be strong. Stay quiet.

Somewhere along the way you learned the rules, and you have been following them well enough that most people think you are fine.

Then the silence turns into distance, and the distance turns into resentment, and eventually something comes out sideways at the worst possible moment. You feel like nothing you do lands right, so you stop trying, and then you get told you have stopped trying.

Those rules were not a character flaw. They kept something at bay, and they worked. We are not going to make you into a different person. We are going to give you more than three moves.

What else this is for

• The pattern itself. Anxious reaching, avoidant withdrawing, or the overfunctioning everyone praises you for and nobody helps you put down.
• The decision. Whether to stay is a question you have been asking alone at two in the morning. You do not have to keep asking it alone, and it has its own page.
• After the divorce. Co-parenting with someone you could not stay married to. Dating again and watching the old script audition new people.
• The anxiety that comes with all of it. Not as a separate problem, but as the weather the pattern creates.
• Being the only one who reaches. You have said it soft, you have said it direct, and you still have to ask.

How the work goes

We find the pattern and name what it is protecting before we try to change it. A strategy that once kept you safe does not respond well to being called a flaw, and that is usually why the last three attempts did not stick.

Then we build something that costs less to run. Some of it is language, learning to say the thing you have been circling for years. Some of it is reps, because understanding a pattern and interrupting one are different skills.

You will have something to practice between sessions and we will talk about how it went. I am direct, I ask a lot of questions, and I will tell you when I think you are avoiding something.

What it costs

Session rate

$170 for 50 minutes. Private pay, out of network for insurance, superbill provided after every session. Full rates and reimbursement details.

Online across Washington and Idaho. Evening and early morning appointments available.