Specialties
Highly Sensitive & Deep Feelers
For people who notice more, feel more and need more time to come back to themselves—and have heard “you’re too sensitive” for as long as they can remember.
Virtual therapy, California and Massachusetts
High sensitivity isn’t a diagnosis or a disorder. It’s a way of being wired—taking in more detail, processing it more deeply, and feeling it more strongly than the people around you seem to. That can make you perceptive, empathic and creative. It can also mean a crowded week, a tense room or a careless comment hits harder than anyone else understands.
If you’re a deep feeler, you may have spent years learning to turn yourself down. In our work together, we won’t be trying to make you less sensitive. We’ll look at what your sensitivity needs in order to feel like a strength again, and at the parts of you that learned to hide it.
What high sensitivity can feel like
You might pick up on a shift in someone’s tone before they’ve said a word, or find that one curt text can sit with you all afternoon. Bright, noisy, crowded places may drain you faster than they seem to drain anyone else. You think things through deeply, sometimes long after everyone has moved on, and beauty—music, a good sentence, the light at the end of a day—can move you more than you’d admit out loud.
None of that is a problem in itself. The trouble tends to start when a sensitive nervous system lives inside a life that doesn’t make room for it. You may notice it as:
- Overwhelm in busy or noisy environments
- Absorbing other people’s emotions as if they were your own
- Strong reactions to criticism, even when it’s mild
- A deep need for meaning, and for time alone to recharge
When sensitivity gets tangled with other patterns
Sensitivity often travels with company. If you learned early that other people’s moods were your responsibility, it can look a lot like people-pleasing and the fawn response. If you coped by getting everything exactly right, it can tip into high-achieving and perfectionism burnout. And when your system has been overloaded for long enough, it can feel a great deal like anxiety, stress and overwhelm.
We’ll work out together which threads belong to sensitivity itself and which belong to the strategies you built around it. That distinction matters, because the strategies can change even though the wiring stays the same.
How we’ll work with it
Much of this work is about the nervous system—learning what overwhelms you, what settles you, and how to come back to yourself after a hard day rather than staying flooded for hours. My page on emotional regulation and nervous system work goes into that side of things. We’ll also use Internal Family Systems to meet the parts of you that took on jobs around your sensitivity: the one that hides it, the one that apologizes for it, the one that’s worn out from carrying it.
Mindfulness and breathwork may come in here too, gently and only if they’re useful to you. The aim isn’t to toughen you up. It’s to help your sensitivity feel less like something to manage and more like something worth protecting.
A note on how I work
My approach is warm, kind and with humor, and I have a deeply non-judgmental attitude, which matters when you’ve spent years being told you’re overreacting. I’m also an active therapist. If you’re worried therapy will mean drowning in feelings for 45 minutes a week, we’ll pace things carefully, with plenty of room to slow down whenever you need to.
If this page reads a little like your biography, you’re welcome to request a free 15-minute consultation. We’ll talk about what you’re carrying and whether working together feels like the right fit.
A few common questions
Is being highly sensitive the same as having anxiety?
No, though the two can overlap. Sensitivity describes how deeply you take things in. Anxiety is a state of alarm that can grow out of many things, including a sensitive system that’s been overloaded for a long time. Untangling the two is part of what we’d do together.
Do I have to call myself an HSP to work on this?
Not at all. Some people find the term “highly sensitive person” a relief, and others find it doesn’t quite fit. What matters is how you experience the world, not which label we use for it.
Will therapy make me less sensitive?
That isn’t the goal. The aim is for your sensitivity to stop running the show—so you can feel deeply without being flooded, set limits without drowning in guilt, and choose environments that suit you. The sensitivity itself is worth keeping.
How we work with this
This most often sits inside individual therapy. 45 minute sessions, weekly or every other week, entirely by video.
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