Understand Why It Keeps Happening
Therapy for deep healing and connection
to create stronger relationships and personal growth
Individuals, Couples, Teens, and Parents in Santa Rosa
and Online Across California
You’ve Been Holding Everything Together for a Long Time
You look capable and put-together on the outside. Underneath, you feel overwhelmed, anxious, disconnected, or exhausted.
You’re taking care of other people, managing responsibilities, keeping things moving. Somewhere along the way, you lost touch with what you need.
No matter how much you accomplish, you’re hard on yourself: you struggle to set a boundary without guilt, you go back over decisions you’ve already made, and you carry a steady sense that you should be doing more, handling things better, or somehow just being more.
What Being the Capable One Costs You
Loneliness finds you even when the room is full of people.
You feel responsible for everyone else’s feelings while having a hard time making room for your own.
Anxiety keeps your mind busy, and low mood makes everything heavier. The critical voice inside makes it difficult to trust yourself or feel good about who you are. It’s hard even to name what’s wrong.
You just know you’re tired of feeling this way.
Sometimes Your Past Doesn’t Stay in the Past
You understand your history, and you’ve thought about it, talked about it, or told yourself it happened a long time ago.
And still, something in an ordinary week brings back feelings far bigger than the moment that set them off.
You scan for signs that someone is upset with you. Trust comes slowly, closeness makes you want to step back, and you hold tight to relationships because losing them feels unbearable.
Accommodating people happens automatically. You apologize when you’ve done nothing wrong, freeze during conflict, or name the exact boundary you need and then can’t set it.
Why Your Old Protections Still Run Your Life
Shame arrives that makes no intellectual sense. You feel responsible for things that were never yours to carry.
Perfectionism, overthinking, constant busyness, and a habit of needing no one have been part of you so long that being any other way is hard to picture.
The past is over, but what you learned to do to survive it is very present.
When Your Teen Is Struggling, Your Whole Family Feels It
Your teen doesn’t seem like the kid you used to know. They’re anxious, sad, angry, withdrawn, overwhelmed, or harder to reach every week, and school has turned into a battle.
Friends drop away, and time alone stretches longer. Small things set off big reactions, and your questions come back as a shrug or a closed door.
You’ve tried every version of this: the direct question, the wide berth, the firm limit, the retreat, the reentry. You still can’t tell whether any of it helped.
When things between you get strained enough, you miss your kid while they’re standing right in front of you.
When You and Your Teen Keep Missing Each Other
You both walk away from the same argument feeling misunderstood. You’re trying to protect them, guide them, or stay connected. They hear criticism, pressure, or a lack of trust.
They pull away and you worry more. The more you worry, the more you ask, remind, push, and try to fix, and the further away they get. In those moments you both say things neither of you means, and under the anger sit hurt, fear, disappointment, and a longing for the relationship to feel different. Eventually even ordinary conversations feel loaded, and everyone is bracing for the next argument.
You love each other. You just don’t know how to reach each other.
When You Care About Each Other but Can’t Find Your Way Back
There was a time when being together felt easier. Now, simple conversations turn into arguments, and the same painful pattern plays out again and again.
One of you moves toward the other and gets nothing back. The chase gets louder, the retreat gets quieter, and within minutes, the argument is no longer about what started it.
By then, you’re fighting about whether you matter to each other at all.
Your Relationship Slipped Into the Background
You feel lonely with the person you love, and physical closeness has changed or quietly gone.
Parenting, work, extended family, money, and the sheer demands of life pushed your relationship further and further into the background.
And sometimes something happens that changes everything. Infidelity, secrecy, betrayal, or broken trust leaves you asking which parts of it were true, whether your partner can be trusted again, and whether the relationship survives this.
The love between you is still there. What neither of you can find is a way to stop the hurting.
When Your Relationship Ends, You Still Have a Relationship
Even when you know the relationship has to end, separation brings grief, anger, fear, relief, guilt, loneliness, and uncertainty, usually all in the same day.
The loss is bigger than the relationship itself. You’re also grieving the future you pictured.
Decisions arrive at exactly the moment when thinking clearly is hardest. If you have children together, there’s no simple walking away.
You stay connected to someone you’re angry with, hurt by, afraid of disappointing, or desperately ready to have some distance from.
Your Old Argument Follows You Into Co-Parenting
Co-parenting brings its own painful realities.
A three-line text about pickup times turns into the whole marriage. Decisions about the kids get made through old wounds.
You worry about what your children are experiencing, what they’re being told, and whether you’re doing any of this right.
The relationship you knew is ending, while the rest of your life insists you keep moving.
What Happens When Your Patterns Never Change?
Most of us develop our coping strategies for good reasons.
You overthink, or avoid, or stay endlessly busy. Someone has to take care of everyone else, so you do.
When that isn’t enough, you shut down, get angry, aim for flawless, or tell yourself you should be able to handle all of it alone.
Those strategies helped you get through difficult experiences.
What Protected You Then Is Costing You Now
Eventually, what once protected you starts to keep you exactly where you are.
The same patterns keep showing up. Anxiety makes your world smaller, old wounds enter new relationships, and conflict turns into distance.
You stop asking for what you need, or surviving becomes so familiar that imagining anything different is hard.
You don’t have to wait until things become unbearable to ask for help.
Hi, I’m Elizabeth.
I’m a Marriage and Family Therapist. After more than two decades with adolescents, adults, couples, and families, one belief has only grown stronger: meaningful change becomes possible when we feel safe enough to be real.
You’ll find me warm, genuine, curious, and down-to-earth. You don’t need the right words, a clear idea of what’s wrong, or a tidier version of the complicated parts before you bring them into the room.
My work is deeply relational and grounded in attachment, trauma, and neuroscience. I want us to go past managing symptoms to what drives them, where your patterns came from, what they helped you survive, and what you need now.
How I’ll Be With You in the Room
I bring specialized training in trauma and relationship therapy to this work, including Somatic and Attachment-Focused EMDR, Emotionally Focused Therapy, Internal Family Systems parts work, and somatic and mindfulness-based approaches.
Cultural humility is part of how I practice, with an awareness that our identities, relationships, families, cultures, and lived experiences are inseparable from the ways we understand ourselves and move through the world.
Warmth, curiosity, compassion, and a willingness to stay with you in the places that are difficult to understand or put into words: that’s what you get from me.
I’m engaged and authentic. I’ll listen closely, notice what’s happening beneath the surface, gently challenge you when it matters, and bring my experience, humor, and humanity into the room with you.
More About MeSomething Different Is Possible for You
There comes a point when simply getting through things isn’t enough anymore.
You want to understand yourself differently. You want to feel more grounded in who you are; more able to trust yourself; and less governed by fear, self-doubt, old wounds, or ways of protecting yourself that you no longer need in the same way.
Slowly, what’s happening underneath the anxiety, anger, withdrawal, self-criticism, or conflict starts to come into view. The reactions that once seemed confusing start to make sense.
Instead of only asking, “What’s wrong with me?” or “Why do we keep doing this?” there’s room for a different question: “What’s happening here, and why?” That understanding opens the door to deeper healing.
We’ll Look Past Your Symptoms to What Drives Them
In our work together, we’ll look past symptoms and surface patterns to the experiences, emotions, relationships, beliefs, and protective responses underneath them.
For individuals, that means processing experiences that still live in your mind and body, understanding protective patterns with more compassion, and finding more freedom in how you respond to yourself and to other people.
For couples, we can slow the pattern down together and start hearing what sits beneath the anger, the withdrawal, or the defensiveness.
Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy anchors that work. It’s attachment-based, and it keeps the focus on the emotional bond at the heart of your closest relationship.
Change Shows Up in Your Ordinary Days
The first changes are quiet ones. You stay present in a moment that used to overwhelm you, and you say what you need without immediately second-guessing it.
A familiar trigger loses some of its force. You can be vulnerable without losing yourself, or get close to someone without abandoning your own needs.
There’s a little more space between what happens and how you respond.
Your Choices Can Start Coming From the Present
Over time, that space becomes freedom: to know yourself more fully, to make choices from the present rather than the past, and to feel more ease, more connection, and a stronger sense of yourself in your life and your relationships.
You don’t have to know exactly how to get there. You just have to be ready to begin.
Let’s meet for a free consultation, and we’ll start from where you are.
- Call(707) 953-0790
- Emailesmith@woodsongtherapy.net
- Schedule a Free Consultation
- Office659 Cherry Street, Suite 105, Santa Rosa, CA 95404