Chronic Illness · Chronic Pain · Invisible Disability · Mind–Body
Therapy for Chronic Illness & Pain in Miami
In-person in Coconut Grove · Telehealth throughout Florida
When the Body Becomes the Story
There is the illness, and then there is everything illness asks of you. The appointments, the waiting, the language that reduces your experience to lab values and treatment protocols. And underneath all of that the grief, the disorientation, the quiet question of who you are now.
Chronic illness and pain do not only change the body. They change the relationship to the body, to the future, to other people, to yourself. They surface questions that medicine is not designed to hold. What does it mean to build a life around a body that requires more care than you expected? How do you mourn a version of your life that no longer exists? How do you stay present to what is here when so much has been taken, altered, or made uncertain?
These are psychological questions. They deserve psychological attention.
You are not the sum of your diagnosis. And you are not alone in what this has cost you.
“The body is not a machine that has broken down. It is a living being, with its own intelligence and its own language.”
— Marion Woodman
What Illness Rarely Gets to Address
The medical system is oriented toward the body as a problem to be solved. For many people living with chronic illness, this means the deeper dimensions of the experience, the grief, the identity disruption, the relational strain, and the fear go largely unaddressed, year after year.
Chronic pain and illness can alter how you understand yourself in ways that are difficult to put into words. A diagnosis may come with relief and devastation at the same moment. Living with an invisible condition, one that is real and significant but not visible to others, can compound this with isolation, doubt, and the exhausting labor of making yourself understood.
Therapy offers a space where the full weight of this experience can be witnessed. Not managed, not minimized, not moved past but genuinely held.
You May Recognize Yourself in Some of These:
- Navigating a diagnosis that has changed how you understand your body or your future
- Living with a condition that others cannot see — and the loneliness of that invisibility
- Grieving the life, capacity, or version of yourself that existed before illness
- Managing the gap between how you appear and what you actually experience
- Feeling reduced to your symptoms in medical settings, or dismissed when you aren’t
- Carrying anxiety, depression, or trauma that has grown around the illness
- Navigating relationships strained by what chronic illness asks of others
- Struggling with identity — who you are now, and who you are allowed to be
- Searching for meaning or orientation in a life significantly shaped by medical reality
- Wanting support that holds both your psychology and your embodied experience
My Approach to Therapy for Chronic Illness & Pain
I practice depth-oriented, trauma-informed psychotherapy that attends to chronic illness and pain as experiences that are simultaneously physical, psychological, relational, and existential. This is not a protocol. It is a sustained, relational process oriented toward genuine understanding rather than symptom management alone.
My background includes advanced psychoanalytic training at the Florida Psychoanalytic Institute and completed BodyDreaming Training — a three-year post-graduate program integrating Somatic Experiencing, Polyvagal Theory, attachment theory, Jungian, and Feminist orientations. The body has always been central to how I understand human experience. More than thirty years as a yoga practitioner and twelve as a teacher have deepened my understanding of what it means to live in and through a body and what the body asks of us when it changes.
I work from an allied, affirming stance with people navigating all forms of chronic and invisible illness. Whether your condition is well-known or rarely understood, I bring genuine curiosity, not assumption, to your particular experience.
The Whole Person
We attend to you as a person whose inner life exists alongside, and in relationship with, your medical reality. Illness is part of your story —
not the definition of it.
Grief & Identity
The psychological dimensions of chronic illness — grief, identity disruption, relational strain, fear — are not secondary concerns. They are central to the experience, and central to our work.
Somatic Awareness
We attend to the body as a source of meaning and intelligence, not merely a site of symptoms. Somatic awareness alongside depth-oriented inquiry creates a more complete space for this work.
An Allied Stance
I do not pathologize the psychological impact of illness. Difficulty is an appropriate response to a difficult experience. My role is to help you understand it — not to suggest you should be coping better.
What This Work Might Include
Every person’s experience of illness is its own. The work takes its shape from what you bring; your history, your particular condition, your nervous system, and what you are ready to explore. That said, this kind of therapy often deepens across several layers.
Grief and loss
Living with chronic illness often involves a form of grief that has no clear social container. The loss of ease, of capacity, of a future you had imagined, of a body you trusted. We make space for this grief seriously, without rushing it toward acceptance or resolution.
Identity and meaning
Illness asks fundamental questions of identity. Who are you now? What remains of the person you were before? How do you build a sense of self that can hold both limitation and continuity? These questions matter, and they take time to answer honestly.
Invisible illness and the labor of being believed
For those whose conditions are invisible to others; whether that is an autoimmune condition, chronic pain, a reproductive or anatomical difference, the long aftermath of an injury, or a neurological condition, there is often a particular exhaustion in navigating a world that cannot see what you carry. We attend to this with care: the invalidation, the self-doubt it can produce, the labor of advocacy, and what all of it costs.
The relational dimensions of illness
Chronic illness changes relationships with partners, family, colleagues, and the medical system. It can alter roles, expectations, and dynamics in ways that bring their own grief and complexity. We can explore these relational dimensions alongside the more internal aspects of your experience.
The nervous system under sustained strain
Long-term stress, medical trauma, and the chronic activation that often accompanies illness leave their mark on the nervous system. Somatically-informed therapy attends to this layer of experience, supporting the body in finding greater regulation alongside the psychological work.
Particular conditions and experiences
I work with people navigating a wide range of chronic and complex health experiences. This includes, but is not limited to: autoimmune conditions such as lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Hashimoto’s, and Crohn’s disease; irritable bowel syndrome and other gastrointestinal conditions whose relationship to stress, nervous system regulation, and psychological experience is often underacknowledged; chronic pain syndromes; reproductive health conditions such as MRKH; post-transplant adjustment; congenital and acquired conditions including spina bifida; post-concussion syndrome and traumatic brain injury; long-term illness of uncertain origin; and the psychological dimensions of navigating medical systems that have not always served you well.
The long aftermath of childhood or past illness
Not all of the psychological weight of illness belongs to the present. For those who were seriously ill as children or young people; who have been in remission for years, or who carry a diagnosis that no longer defines their daily life — there is often a layer of experience that was never processed at the time. Illness in childhood can disrupt development in ways that are difficult to name in retrospect: what was missed, what was required of you too early, how the body learned to carry fear or vigilance or difference before you had the language for any of it. The past illness may be over. Its emotional and psychological residue often is not. This work can attend to that history with the seriousness it deserves.
When you are the one who loves someone with illness
Chronic illness does not only affect the person who has it. It shapes the lives of those who love them, partners, family members, or close friends in ways that are rarely named and rarely given space. The weight of this experience is real: watching someone you love suffer without being able to fix it, adjusting your own life to accommodate illness while quietly setting aside your own needs, navigating a relationship whose terms keep changing. There is grief here too. Not only the grief of what the illness has taken from the person who is ill, but the grief of what it has taken from you, from the relationship, from the future you imagined, from the version of yourself that existed before caregiving became central to your life.
There is also the complexity that comes with love under sustained strain: the guilt of resentment, the isolation of a role that others may not fully understand, the ambiguity of losses that have no clear name. If this is the terrain you are navigating, this work can hold it. You do not have to be the one who is ill to have your experience taken seriously here.
Integration
The goal of this work is not to arrive at acceptance on a particular timeline, or to manage your experience more efficiently. It is to develop a genuine, supported relationship with the life you are living with all that it holds.
Who Tends to Seek This Work
I work with adults who are navigating the long-term experience of chronic illness, chronic pain, or invisible disability and who are looking for psychological support that takes the full weight of that experience seriously.
You do not need to be in crisis to benefit from this work. Many people who seek this kind of therapy are managing well in practical terms while carrying something significant internally; grief that has nowhere to go, identity questions without clear answers, or a sense that their inner experience of illness has never quite been witnessed.
This work may be particularly relevant if you are:
- Living with a chronic physical condition whose psychological dimensions have gone unaddressed
- Navigating the experience of invisible illness — including conditions that are poorly understood, hard to name, or hard to communicate to others
- Processing a significant diagnosis, or adjusting to a life substantially altered by illness
- Managing the aftermath of medical trauma, difficult treatment experiences, or repeated dismissal
- A professional, creative, or high-functioning adult who has continued to perform externally while internally carrying the weight of illness
- Seeking support that integrates somatic awareness with genuine psychological depth
- Looking for a therapist who will not minimize your experience or push you toward premature resolution
- Carrying the unprocessed emotional weight of a childhood or past illness — one that may no longer be active, but whose psychological residue has never been fully addressed
- Someone who loves a person with chronic illness — navigating the grief, role strain, relational complexity, and quiet losses that come with that experience
Available in Miami and Throughout Florida
I offer in-person psychotherapy at my office in Coconut Grove, Miami. I also work with clients throughout Florida via secure telehealth —
the same relational depth and unhurried presence, in a virtual format.
Sessions are 50 minutes. Longer sessions are available when clinically appropriate.