Therapy in Missouri
Depression & Anxiety Therapy
Available in-person in St. Louis and online across MO for men and women who want lasting change, not another coping strategy.
You’ve been holding your life together through sheer willpower, and it’s starting to cost you.
The day-to-day things you usually handle easily have started to feel unmanageable. Coping tools that usually help—the exercise and the hobbies—aren't doing much for you anymore, and you’re starting to wonder if something is wrong with you.
You know these feelings didn’t happen randomly, even if it feels like they did.
It usually starts when your partner gets upset, your boss demands too much, or your teen makes a flippant comment. Your instinct has always been to manage it—to smooth things over. So you adjust, you work harder, and you stay quiet. For a while, things are okay enough.
It never lasts long, though, does it?
Eventually you explode or lash out, surprising yourself that you could be so angry.
Or you might fully shut down and withdraw because you don’t know another way.
IT SHOWS UP AGAIN AND AGAIN IN YOUR LIFE:
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You and your partner tend to run hot, so important conversations always seem to end with yelling or tears. You don’t know how to communicate what you’re feeling or what you want (if you even know what those things are yet) without hitting a nerve. Since you can’t seem to do anything about the dynamic, you focus all your energy on just keeping the peace.
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Painful dynamics from your childhood are still with you, even though you moved out years (or decades) ago. Maybe you can create some distance for a little while, but once a holiday or birthday rolls around, you’re pulled right back in. You’ve considered setting boundaries, but you can’t turn your back on family—so you’re kind of stuck.
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Maybe you have a toddler who is testing your limits or a teen who treats you like dirt, even though you strive to give them the world. You’re determined to be the best parent possible, but you wear thin and snap—only to be overcome by shame and a creeping fear you’re failing them.
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You're good at your job and you know it, but you're picking up everyone else's slack and biting your tongue around your boss. You’re busting your butt, but when the promotion goes to someone else, you start to wonder what it's all even for.
What if there was a perfectly understandable reason behind what you're feeling?
MY APPROACH
If you’re like many of my clients, you’re functioning well enough and you have a life that’s largely intact—maybe even impressively so. It doesn’t always make immediate “sense” that you’d be feeling depressed or anxious.
What I find is these feelings usually stem from something specific happening in their relationships and the way they respond to it. Depression that seemingly came out of nowhere may have arrived right after a fight with your spouse or a tough conversation with a work colleague where you felt like you needed to shut down to keep everyone happy.
The most useful thing we can do in our sessions is trace the feelings back to what happened before they settled in.
Once we identify this kind of cause and effect, we look at what you want to do differently. This approach allows you to make changes from the inside out—not because I gave you a framework to follow, but because you understand your own patterns for yourself.
You start to realize you have more choices about how to respond to these situations as they come up, the fog clears, and you begin to feel like you have a say in your own life again.
That’s ultimately the goal of this work.
Therapy for depression & anxiety can help you…
Learn to work with difficult emotions instead of shutting them down, avoiding them, or feeling controlled by them.
Understand that anger, envy, sadness, and anxiety are not signs you’re bad or broken, but emotional signals that can be understood and used constructively.
Identify the relationship patterns and triggers that contribute to depression and anxiety, so you can respond in the way you choose.
Begin to feel better by addressing the deeper emotional and relational sources of depression, rather than relying only on distraction or surface-level coping.
Improve relationships without losing yourself, people-pleasing, or becoming responsible for everyone else’s comfort.
Feel more comfortable expressing yourself, setting boundaries, and honoring your own needs, wishes, and history without being defined by the past.
THERAPY FOR DEPRESSION & ANXIETY IN ST. LOUIS
There's a way through this besides trying harder at the same things. Let’s do something different that actually works.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
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You do not need to wait until depression or anxiety have taken control of your life. Therapy may be worth considering if you keep replaying conversations, feel exhausted by ordinary responsibilities, withdraw from people you care about, struggle to enjoy things, or notice the same cycles returning no matter what you try. If it is affecting how you live, work, relate to people, or feel about yourself, it matters enough to discuss.
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Depression and anxiety rarely appear out of the clear blue sky. You may notice them intensify after conflict, disappointment, loss, feeling overlooked, or spending too long ignoring your own needs. Therapy helps us look beyond the symptoms and understand the patterns, relationships, beliefs, and past experiences that keep stirring them up, so you have more options than simply managing the next episode.
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Coping skills can help you get through a difficult moment, but you may already know several and still find yourself back in the same place. Our work focuses on understanding why anxiety or depression keeps returning. Practical changes often emerge from that understanding, but I will not hand you a generic list and pretend it solves a problem that is specific to you.
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I’m a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with more than 17 years of experience and advanced training in psychodynamic psychotherapy,, trauma-informed therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and evidence-based assessment. This training helps me look beyond a list of symptoms and understand the emotional, relational, and historical patterns underneath them, while still keeping our work focused on the changes you want to make.
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If you are in crisis, feeling unable to keep yourself safe, or worried you may harm yourself or someone else, scheduling a therapy consultation is not the right next step. Call or text 988 to connect with a crisis counselor, or call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room if you are in immediate danger. Once the immediate crisis has passed, we can discuss whether ongoing therapy would be an appropriate source of support.
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For a lot of people, the anxiety around conflict developed for a reason. If you've been managing a relationship with someone who's frequently angry or emotionally unpredictable, you learn to subconsciously stay on alert. You start scanning for signs of tension and bracing for the next thing, trying to stay one step ahead of someone else's mood. That vigilance made sense in context. The problem is it tends to generalize, and you end up on alert even when you can see that nothing is actually wrong. We can look closely at the patterns you’re experiencing and figure out how to break them so you can finally relax.
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Sometimes they can. A significant amount of the depression I treat is being generated by relationship patterns: chronic conflict and the cumulative weight of suppressing your own feelings to manage it. When those patterns are understood and addressed, depression tends to lift in a way you can’t achieve with coping skills alone.
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Depression and anxiety that are being generated by relationship patterns, absorbing someone else's anger or suppressing your own to avoid conflict, tend to affect how you show up in those relationships, which creates more of the same stress, which makes the depression and anxiety worse. Understanding where the issue is coming from for you specifically is usually the most useful place to start.