Chronic illness and pain counseling.

Living with chronic illness or chronic pain can change the shape of everyday life.

Things that once felt simple may require planning, energy, or recovery. Your relationship with your body changes. Work, friendships, intimacy, independence, and plans for the future may all be affected. And when an illness or condition is invisible, poorly understood, or difficult to diagnose, you may also find yourself navigating the exhausting experience of having to explain, or even defend, what you are going through. Chronic illness counseling offers a place to talk about all of it.

Living with ongoing illness and pain can bring anxiety, frustration, anger, sadness, isolation, and grief. There may be good days when life feels almost normal and difficult days when your body determines what is possible. You may find yourself constantly calculating your energy, anticipating symptoms, worrying about the next flare, or wondering whether making plans is worth the risk of having to cancel them.

For some people, the hardest part is uncertainty. You may be searching for a diagnosis, receiving conflicting medical advice, trying treatment after treatment, or learning to live with questions that medicine cannot fully answer. Others have a clear diagnosis but are struggling with what it means for their future. Therapy for chronic illness and chronic pain provides space to process these experiences without reducing everything you are feeling to a symptom or asking you to simply "think positively."

Chronic illness also involves loss, although those losses are not always recognized as grief. You may grieve the body you once had, activities you loved, a career path, financial security, spontaneity, independence, or the future you imagined for yourself. Sometimes the loss is temporary; sometimes it is permanent; and often you simply don't know yet. That uncertainty can make grief and chronic illness particularly complicated.

My approach is grounded in existential, humanistic, and mindfulness-based therapy. Together, we can explore what’s most meaningful to you, whether that’s tools for coping with symptoms, working with anxiety, grief, identity, relationships, boundaries, or self-compassion, or something else, like understanding the difficult gap between what you want your body to do and what it is able to do right now.

When helpful, I also incorporate body awareness, mindfulness, breathing, and other experiential approaches. For people living with chronic pain, this work is never about suggesting that pain is "all in your head." Pain is real. At the same time, persistent pain can affect—and be affected by—stress, fear, sleep, attention, mood, and the nervous system. Therapy can help you develop tools for responding to these interconnected experiences with greater awareness and less fear.

Medical experiences themselves can also become a source of distress. Repeated procedures, frightening symptoms, unexpected diagnoses, difficult hospitalizations, or feeling dismissed by healthcare providers can contribute to medical trauma and a loss of trust in your own body. Counseling can provide a place to process these experiences and begin rebuilding a sense of safety.

Relationships may change, too. Partners and family members may struggle to understand fluctuating abilities or know how to help. You may worry about becoming a burden, feel guilty asking for support, or find yourself pushing beyond your limits to avoid disappointing others. Therapy can help you communicate your needs, establish boundaries, and maintain connection without abandoning your own well-being.

My goal is not to convince you to accept everything that has happened or find a silver lining in suffering. It is to help you make room for what is difficult while continuing to discover what matters to you.

Your life may look different than you expected. Different does not mean without meaning, connection, possibility, or joy. Together, we can work toward building a life that honors both the reality of what you are carrying and the person you are beyond your illness or pain.