Online Chronic Illness Therapy

Online Individual & Couples Therapy Across Ten States

Stay Yourself While Living With Chronic Or Serious Illness

When Illness Changes More Than Your Health

Living with a chronic or serious illness reorganizes your whole life and most of that reorganizing happens where no one can see it. There are the appointments, the medications, the test results, and then everything underneath: the fear about what comes next, the grief for the life you pictured, the strange work of staying yourself while your body does things you didn't agree to.

Before your feet even hit the floor in the morning, you're already doing the math on how much energy you have and whether it's going to cover the day. You cancel the plan you were looking forward to and feel guilty for canceling and angry that you have to. You smile when someone says you look great because it's easier than explaining what today actually took. Most people in your life have no idea how much you carry and you've gotten very good at making sure of that.

Chronic Illness Takes Many Forms

I work with people living with all kinds of chronic and serious illness, including:

Heart conditions like congestive heart failure (CHF)

Lung conditions like COPD

Lupus and other autoimmune disorders

POTS and dysautonomia

Chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS)

Multiple sclerosis (MS)

Cancer and other serious diagnoses with a longer road ahead

If your condition isn't on this list but your life has been reorganized by your health, you're still in the right place.

Exhausted And Never Sure When A Bad Day Is Coming

You don't have to recognize yourself in
every one of these

You ration your energy all day and still pay for it when you push too far

People treat you like a patient first and a person second, even when no one says it

Everyone says you look great, with no idea what today took out of you

You catch yourself grieving things that haven't happened yet, milestones you're scared you'll miss

You've told so many doctors your story and still no one holds the whole picture

If you saw yourself up there, nothing is wrong with you. This is what living with a serious health condition asks of a person and that's a lot to handle on your own.

Live More Fully In The Life You Have

You can have a life that's about more than managing your health.

Imagine being able to:

Have a place to bring the fear and grief instead of sitting with them at 3am

Be seen as a whole person, not a patient or a diagnosis

Say the scared, un-shiny things out loud to someone who won't flinch

Reconnect with what still matters to you, beyond managing your health

Spend the energy you have on what's meaningful to you, not just on getting through

Find Your Footing Again In
This Chapter

What if your days had more give in them
than they do now?

The appointments still happen but they stop swallowing the whole week emotionally. You stop rehearsing the brave face because you've finally got one place you don't need it.

The 3am fears have somewhere to go now instead of just circling. The grief for the life you imagined gets to be real and spoken instead of swallowed and somehow that makes it lighter to carry. You start to feel like the main character in your own life again, not a problem to be managed.

And you reconnect with the things that are still yours, the people, the small pleasures, the sense of who you are underneath all of it. Your health is part of your story. It stops being the whole thing.

How Chronic Illness
Therapy Works

This is talk therapy, one-on-one and online, with sessions that run about 75 minutes. I'm warm and direct and very human and after more than two decades in this world there's almost nothing you can say that will surprise me.

Here's how the work tends to come together:

01

We start wherever the weight is heaviest right now, not with a long intake or a checklist

02

We get clear on what your illness has changed: your days, your relationships, your sense of who you are.

03

We make room for the hard feelings underneath, the fear and the grief and the anger, without rushing you toward positive.

04

We work on holding onto your identity and your meaning, so the diagnosis stops running the whole show.

05

As we go, you build a steadier way of living alongside your health instead of being swallowed by it.

I've spent more than twenty years in hospitals, intensive care units, and hospice. I built my doctoral work around serious illness. The medical world you're living inside is one I know from the inside, which means you won't have to explain the basics to me before we can get to what actually matters.

FAQ

Common Questions Before We Start

Do I need a specific diagnosis to start?

No. If your health has reshaped your life, that's enough. We can start wherever you are, with or without a tidy label.

Can therapy really help if my illness isn't going away?

Yes. The goal isn't to cure your body, it's to help you live more like yourself alongside what you're managing, with less fear and less isolation.

What if I'm not sure I'm "sick enough" for this?

If it's heavy enough that you're wondering, it's heavy enough to bring. You don't have to earn your way in with a worst-case diagnosis.

Do you work with people in all your states?

I see clients online across all ten states where I'm licensed, from wherever you're comfortable.

Have Someone In Your Corner
Who Gets It

Free 15-Minute Consultation

If you'd like someone in this with you who already knows the medical world from the inside, let's talk. Book a free 15-minute consultation and we'll talk through what you're facing and how I can support you through it.

You can schedule a time that works for you.