People-pleasing, trouble communicating and setting boundaries, low self-worth, validating yourself and your experience, difficulty feeling your feelings even though you feel like an emotional person. Usually this is connected to experiencing trauma, whether complex or relational, and when we focus on “fixing” the anxiety and seeing ourselves as the problem, we can reinforce the messaging we’ve received that we’re bad and not enough. When we step out of that loop and cyclical way of thinking, share our stories, and view ourselves with compassion, our anxiety naturally has a way of evening out. We find we weren’t really the problem to begin with.

Whether you’ve been given a specific diagnosis or just know you struggle with eating or body image, I see disordered eating and body image as a symptom of something larger and more foundational - usually a fractured relationship with the self and a history of trauma.

We usually think of grief as the experience we go through after losing a loved one, however grief is what we experience after any kind of loss. It’s impossible to be a human and not experience grief. The more we can allow for the grief to come up and be felt and heard, the more freedom and healing we can experience.

Feeling like you don’t know who you are and the unsettled nature of that. This relates to all aspects of life - our worldview, relationships, profession, sense of purpose and meaning, and spirituality/religion. It can feel very jarring to not know who you are and how to figure that out.

I’ve found both in my work with clients and as a client that feeling excessively irritable can be a sign of something deeper - a fractured relationship with the self. Anger is also a very scary and misunderstood emotion, especially for women who have been conditioned to avoid expressing it. The truth is though to be human means to experience emotions, and anger is one of them. The more we can respect and honor anger and allow it to come up and be felt and heard, the better.