Women's Counseling

Offering counseling to women by a woman. All issues are approached with compassion, respect, empathy and acceptance.      

Women in our society face unique cultural pressures. As a woman, you have diverse and potentially conflicting life style alternatives. You can choose to follow tradition, possibly choosing a life style like that of your mother.  Or you may forge an opposite path of independence from family and individual autonomy; climbing the corporate ladder, for example. There are many life style variations between the extremes. Women can choose to have children or not; follow a career or focus on family and friends; get married or stay single; or choose a partner, male or female. Within each of these life styles, we bring internalized expectations for ourselves and for others. The rules are not always conscious. With each of your life choices, there is inherent gain and loss.

Issues we often address:

Women are often in the nurturing role in relationships and families. They can feel conflicts between meeting the needs of others and taking care of themselves. Often, women lose a sense of who they are and what is important to them. You may have resorted to acquiescing to others' demands to keep the peace or alternately, having to nag to the point you don’t recognize yourself. Counseling can help you clarify what’s important, what is worth fighting for and what is not.

Women in our country face pressures of youth worship and often over-emphasis on your looks and demeanor. These pressures may feel superficial to the exclusion of the value you add from your intelligence, creatively, and uniqueness. You can feel pulled in so many directions that nothing you do seems as good as you feel you could do. The result might be an eroding sense of self esteem.

Weight gain and weight loss dominate women’s magazines and our culture. Huge amounts of money are spent on diets and exercise programs that are rarely successful. Women often judge their worth by what the scale is showing.

Counseling can help you get off the dieting merry-go-round and lift your energy and happiness. Your weight problem may be serious, as in obesity or anorexia, or less severe, but a constant irritant whose self depreciating voice is in your head. In counseling, we can look at the issues that are preventing success and help you deal with them. Counseling will help you re-focus on health.  

Counseling can help you understand the choices you have made to date, intentionally or not. As you gain knowledge of the direction that your life is taking, you can begin to make informed decisions on your priorities, what will make you happy and fulfilled, and then deal with any losses associated with options you may choose to leave behind. Counseling can help you feel comfortable making your choices and trusting your decisions.