Who do I work with?
Some of my clients come in around a specific problem: fear of failure, chronic indecision, difficulty in dating or relationships. But underneath, there's usually a shared history. Many of them learned early that the safest move was to stay small and quiet, or to stay alert and manage whoever was in the room. Their caretakers were frequently depressed, anxious, running on survival mode, or emotionally immature in ways that made them present in the house but unreachable.
Environments like that don't just teach you certain beliefs. They shape the person you turn into. A child adapting to an emotionally unsafe home doesn't just conclude that their needs are inconvenient. That conclusion sinks below the level of thought and becomes reflex, part of your temperament, part of how you read every room you walk into.
Clinically this falls under relational or developmental trauma, sometimes called Complex PTSD (C-PTSD). In practice it means years of emotional needs going unanswered, and then an adult life marked by overthinking, perfectionism, difficulty saying no, shame that never quite has an object, and a sense of being responsible for how everyone else is doing. If you recognize yourself in that description, we're probably a good fit.
How long does therapy take?
Consider what you were actually exposed to growing up: roughly 6,500 days of watching how the adults around you handled closeness, conflict, disappointment, and need. That's the curriculum your nervous system was trained on.
Say your emotional needs were routinely met with irritation or absence. What forms isn't a single bad memory, it's a working assumption: reaching out doesn't get me anywhere, so why bother reaching. That assumption then quietly governs your friendships, your relationships, and often your willingness to be in therapy at all.
My work uses the therapy relationship itself as the place those assumptions get revised, because they were formed in relationship and rarely change outside of one. On that timeline, a year of treatment counts as brief. A number of my clients have been with me for several years. The change comes from accumulation, not from any single breakthrough session.
Because I'm committing to that process with you, I ask for weekly sessions (holidays and planned time off aside). That rhythm is what makes it possible to revise patterns this old, down to the level of how your body registers threat and safety.
References
Relapse after cognitive behavior therapy of depression: potential implications for longer courses of treatment. (1992). American Journal of Psychiatry, 149(8), 1046–1052. https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.149.8.1046
Ali, S., Rhodes, L., Moreea, O., McMillan, D., Gilbody, S., Leach, C., Lucock, M., Lutz, W., & Delgadillo, J. (2017). How durable is the effect of low intensity CBT for depression and anxiety? Remission and relapse in a longitudinal cohort study. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 94, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2017.04.006
Leichsenring, F., & Rabung, S. (2008). Effectiveness of long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy: A meta-analysis. JAMA, 300(13), 1551–1565. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.300.13.1551