Individual Therapy with Alana

You Give the Room the Answer It Can Handle

Somebody in the conversation turns to you and asks what you actually think, and in the half second before you answer, you calculate which version of your opinion costs the least.

You hand over the version you calculated, the conversation stays easy, and nobody in it learns a single thing about you.

The answer you actually had sits back down and waits for a room that seems safer, and that room hasn’t shown up in a while.

The People Closest to You Get the Edited Version

You’ve been running that calculation since you were young enough to notice you didn’t come out like the other kids, and being agreeable and slightly smaller than the moment kept everybody comfortable, because the fear underneath it is that you’re too much.

It costs you most in the relationships you’re working hardest to keep, and it starts costing you long before it looks like something worth bringing to therapy.

You’re Not Going to Surprise Me With It

Therapy asked something of me well before it became my work, and I’ve spent real time in the chair you’re considering sitting in.

Moving constantly with a military family, I learned early how to size up a new room and decide who to be inside it.

It took me years, and a therapist of my own, to hear that noticing everyone that closely was an ability rather than a defect.

I don’t need you to make any of it presentable before you say it out loud.

Your Goals Can Wait Until You Know Whose They Are

Most of the early work is unglamorous and slow, and it amounts to learning to read your own emotions and your own behavior accurately.

I’ll stay put while that comprehension assembles, asking gently curious questions about what happened in the room and what your body was doing while it happened.

Once you can name your own patterns without needing me to name them, we build therapeutic goals together out of what you’ve understood.

Goals set any earlier describe the person you were nominated to be, and you’ve had plenty of practice being that person already.

What Changes When You Stop Managing Every Room

The calculation gets loud enough to hear, and you catch yourself running it in the half second before you answer somebody’s question.

Catching it is most of the work, because a habit you can see is a habit you get to decide about.

Your friendships and your family start getting the unedited version, which is unnerving for a while and then simply becomes your life.

For the Version You Don’t Usually Bring

I work with adults online throughout Texas, so write to me at amccraw@plantedtobloomcounseling.org from wherever you are and tell me as much or as little as you want me to know before we ever talk.

The consultation is free, runs twenty minutes, and we spend it talking instead of filling anything out, so you can decide about me.

Planted to Bloom also works with anxiety, low mood, life transitions, chronic pain, attachment patterns, body image and eating disorders, so write even if your concern isn’t named here.

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