My doctors dismissed me. How is therapy different?

Being believed is the starting point, not the goal. Medical dismissal is its own wound and comes into the work as something real that happened.

Specialty

Chronic Illness

The mental and emotional toll of chronic illness: the part your doctors don’t treat. Telehealth therapy across New York.

Endometriosis · EDS · POTS · MCAS · Autoimmune Conditions · Chronic Pain · And More

What It Looks Like

If any of this is familiar.

Grieving the version of your life you planned before the diagnosis
“That’s just part of it, learn to cope,” and leaving another appointment feeling dismissed instead of helped
The exhaustion of being your own advocate, researcher, and case manager
Canceling plans again, and managing everyone else’s disappointment on top of your own
Second-guessing your own body after being doubted so many times
Pretending everything is fine because you don’t want to be a burden, so you carry it alone, when you shouldn’t have to

The Approach

How I work with chronic illness.

Sessions hold both realities at once: the medical facts and the emotional weight of living with them. Grief for the plans that changed, the identity that shifted, the trust worn down in waiting rooms. We work at the body-mind connection because that’s where chronic illness lives, and practical tools stay part of the work for the hard weeks.

Where the emotional pain gets the same attention as the physical.

Background

What I bring to this.

Chronic illness is specialty work for me, shaped by both clinical training and personal experience. You won’t spend sessions teaching me the basics of your condition or convincing me it’s real. And telehealth means sessions happen from wherever your body is that day. A flare doesn’t have to mean starting over.

Questions

Chronic illness therapy questions.

Do I need to explain my condition to you?

Not from scratch. I work with conditions like endometriosis, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS), POTS, MCAS, autoimmune conditions, and chronic pain, and the list doesn’t end there. You’ll spend your sessions on your life, not on educating your therapist.

My doctors dismissed me. How is this different?

Being believed is the starting point here, not the goal. Medical dismissal is its own wound, and it comes into the work as something real that happened to you, not something to argue you out of.

Can therapy help with something physical?

Therapy doesn’t treat the disease, and I’ll never claim otherwise. It treats what the disease does to your life: the grief, the anxiety, the identity shift, the relationships that strained under it. The work is body-inclusive, paying attention to what symptoms, flares, and stress do to each other, alongside practical tools for the hard weeks. That part responds to the work.

What happens when I’m too sick for a session?

We figure it out honestly, together. Some days a session from bed is exactly the right therapy, and some days rescheduling is the right call. Flares are part of the work here, not an interruption of it.

I have endometriosis. Is that here or under reproductive health?

Both. Endometriosis is chronic illness and reproductive health at once, plus the medical dismissal that so often comes with it. My approach is integrative, so the physical, the emotional, and the relational get treated as one picture.

Your body is part of the story.

The consultation is completely free, from wherever you are. No pressure to have it figured out.