Therapy for Hereditary Cancer Risk in Granada Hills and across CA
Make peace with your body and hold hope for the future
This wasn’t the script you had for your life…
Maybe you’re…
Feeling pretty healthy, but your sister just got diagnosed with breast cancer, and now you’re exploring genetic counseling.
Trying to get pregnant and now you need to consider if you need preimplantation genetic testing. You’re wondering what questions to ask to decide.
Just got diagnosed as a “pre-vivor”. How do you balance risk management with planning for an unknown future? Do you choose prophylactic surgeries for peace of mind or do you wait and risk?
In your survivorship era–you got over cancer, but now you find yourself getting scanxiety every 6 months and losing sleep about recurrence.
How it's showing up now...
You’re frozen and can’t decide what you need. It’s taking up all your mental space and you can’t focus on work, let alone have space for joy.
It’s keeping you from being present with your partner or friends. You feel all the pressure to make decisions now, and your mind races through all the options and settles nowhere.
You feel shame about not having a partner yet to conceive with, or not prioritizing freezing your eggs when you were younger. You wish fertility and family planning weren’t such an issue, but it’s real.
Post cancer, you feel pressured to return to normal. Your friends and family stopped checking in on you. The demands of work don’t stop. You’re going through the motions and surviving, but you don’t feel, well, alive. What does life look like now?
Helping you come to terms with your new reality
Imagine...
Waking up in the morning and having mental space for the day, instead of being caught in ruminations about your upcoming scan.
Looking at your schedule for the next week and trusting that you can be present for whatever shows up–appointments, scans, and all.
Coming to terms with your ability to conceive, whatever happens next.
Making decisions from a whole, grounded place—secure in your identity, your worth, and your narrative.
Therapy with me looks like…
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Therapy with me looks like… *
In our first session, you step into my office and notice how your body immediately starts to breathe a little deeper and slow down. You may even start to notice uncomfortable sensations (perhaps a moment of quiet or rambling), and hurry to cover it up, or move past it. I will encourage you to be present with those sensations, and guide you in attuning to what you might need, and apply practical skills to help you self-regulate.
A couple months into our sessions, you may notice feeling more able to quiet the mental noise. You’ll notice when you compulsively ruminate and catastrophize, and shift to acknowledging and validating deeper needs. You’ll find yourself naturally making decisions to proactively care for your well-being.
As we go deeper, we may dig into your past and find uncomfortable truths about your family or dreams you’d like to avoid. We will face it all together. You may find yourself triggered and feeling all the feelings now, after squishing it down for years. Your anger is not to be feared–it is an invitation to be with all parts of yourself, to hear the truths you’d like to ignore. We may use Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing (EMDR) to reprocess those painful moments so they no longer hold the same emotional charge, and you feel more resilient and liberated to step into a fresh future.
I will sit shiva with you as you grieve the future you anticipated, and celebrate with you as you imagine a new story worth inhabiting.
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I will sit shiva with you as you grieve the future you anticipated, and celebrate with you as you imagine a new story worth inhabiting. *
Therapy for hereditary cancer risk can help you…
Accept your body as it is
Grieve the loss of the future you expected, and embrace the life before you
Hold hope with tenderness and fierceness
Get real about what matters
Orient towards your body as a source of goodness
