THERAPY FOR HIGHLY SENSITIVE PEOPLE, EMPATHS AND NEURODIVERGENT ADULTS IN CALIFORNIA
You may experience the world differently from the people around you.
Maybe you have always known that you are sensitive.
You may notice subtle shifts in your environment, feel things deeply, need more time to process experiences, or become overwhelmed by stimulation that other people seem able to tolerate more easily.
You may call yourself a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) or an empath. You may identify as autistic, ADHD, AuDHD, or otherwise neurodivergent. You may identify with more than one of these experiences.
Or you may not use any of these words at all.
You simply know that the way you process the world can sometimes feel more intense, complicated, or demanding than it seems to be for other people.
For some people, that means deep emotional responsiveness and sensitivity to other people's feelings. For others, it means sensory intensity, difficulty shifting attention, executive functioning challenges, a need for predictability or more recovery time, or feeling chronically out of step with expectations that seem easier for everyone else.
And for many people, it is some combination.
These differences may exist alongside creativity, intuition, empathy, intelligence, originality, and a rich inner life. They can also contribute to anxiety, overwhelm, self-doubt, burnout, masking, relationship difficulties, or the persistent feeling that you are somehow doing life incorrectly.
Therapy can help you understand the way you experience the world without treating who you are as something that needs to be fixed.
Does any of this sound familiar?
You become overwhelmed more easily than you think you “should.”
Noise, crowds, interruptions, social demands, conflict, competing tasks, or simply too much happening at once can leave you depleted.
You think deeply about things and sometimes have difficulty turning your mind off.
You may need more time to process experiences, emotions, decisions, or transitions.
Criticism, rejection, conflict, or unpredictability can stay with you long after the situation has passed.
You appear competent and composed while privately feeling anxious, scattered, exhausted, or uncertain.
You need solitude, structure, predictability, or downtime but judge yourself for needing it.
You may have a vivid inner world, intense interests, or a creative side that has not always had enough room in your life.
You have spent years adapting yourself to expectations that do not always fit the way you naturally function.
You understand yourself intellectually but still struggle to know what you actually need in the moment.
You may have spent years believing that you were too sensitive, too intense, too emotional, too distracted, too anxious, too rigid, too needy, too much—or somehow not enough.
Therapy offers another possibility: becoming curious about the way you process the world, the experiences that shaped you, and what you actually need in order to thrive.
High Sensitivity and Anxiety Often Overlap—But They Are Not the Same Thing
Many highly sensitive people also struggle with anxiety.
You might anticipate what could go wrong, replay conversations, worry about relationships, seek reassurance, struggle with decisions, or become highly aware of sensations in your body.
You may also be perfectionistic. When you notice a great deal, think through many possibilities, and care deeply about getting things right, even relatively ordinary decisions can become complicated.
Sensitivity can become particularly difficult when it exists alongside experiences that taught you to stay alert.
If you grew up needing to read the room, anticipate someone's mood, minimize your own needs, perform well, avoid mistakes, keep the peace, or maintain connection with an inconsistent caregiver, sensitivity may become intertwined with anxiety, hypervigilance, people-pleasing, and difficulty trusting yourself.
Part of therapy may involve learning to distinguish:
What is sensitivity?
What is anxiety?
What belongs to your history?
What reflects the way you naturally process the world?
And what is actually happening right now?
Those distinctions can create substantially more freedom.
Therapy for Empaths: Caring Deeply Without Losing Yourself
Some people use the word empath to describe how intensely they experience other people.
You may walk into a room and immediately sense that something has shifted. You may notice when someone is upset before they say anything. Other people may confide in you easily, and you may find yourself carrying their feelings long after the conversation has ended.
Being deeply empathic can make you compassionate and extraordinarily responsive in relationships.
It can also make boundaries complicated.
You may feel responsible for other people's emotional states. You may struggle to tolerate someone's disappointment. You may automatically take care of another person's experience before you have even registered your own.
Therapy can help you remain empathic without disappearing into other people.
The goal is not to care less.
It is to develop a stronger sense of where you end and someone else begins.
We believe in simple ideas, strong relationships, and lasting impact. What began as a passion project has evolved into something more. We’re proud of where we’ve been and even more excited for what’s ahead.
Therapy for Neurodivergent Adults
For some people, high sensitivity exists alongside ADHD, autism, AuDHD, or another form of neurodivergence.
For others, neurodivergence has little to do with emotional sensitivity to other people and much more to do with the way they process sensory information, attention, social demands, transitions, executive functioning, or everyday expectations.
You may have known you were neurodivergent for years. You may have recognized it later in adulthood. Or you may be wondering whether experiences you have always attributed to anxiety, sensitivity, personality, or “not trying hard enough” might reflect a different way of processing the world.
You might recognize:
sensory overwhelm or difficulty filtering competing input
masking or working hard to appear fine
social exhaustion or a need for substantial recovery time
difficulty initiating, organizing, transitioning between, or completing tasks
periods of intense focus or deeply absorbing interests
inconsistent productivity despite significant effort
executive functioning challenges
a strong need for structure, predictability, or preparation
burnout from repeatedly pushing past your limits
feeling misunderstood in relationships
wondering why things that seem easy for other people require so much effort from you
Neurodivergent people are not all alike.
Some autistic or ADHD people are highly emotionally attuned and empathic. Others are not. Some quickly register subtle interpersonal cues, while others process social and emotional information differently or need communication to be more explicit.
There is no single neurodivergent personality.
Therapy is about understanding your particular combination of temperament, attention, sensory experience, emotional life, history, relationships, strengths, and challenges rather than assuming that one label explains everything about you.
You May Have Learned to Override Yourself
Many sensitive and neurodivergent people become exceptionally skilled at adapting.
You tolerate environments that exhaust you.
You push through sensory or emotional overload.
You remain in conversations long after you have reached your limit.
You work in ways that aren't sustainable because they seem to be the ways you are supposed to work.
You say yes when something inside you is saying no.
You may become highly competent, productive, accommodating, self-sufficient, or skilled at hiding what is difficult for you.
You may even become very good at understanding why you feel the way you do while remaining disconnected from what you actually need.
Over time, this can contribute to anxiety, resentment, exhaustion, shutdown, physical tension, burnout, difficulty making decisions, or disconnection from your creativity and sense of self.
Therapy offers an opportunity to reverse that process.
Not by becoming less sensitive.
Not by forcing yourself to function like everyone else.
But by becoming more able to recognize your limits, understand your needs, and build a life that works with the person you actually are.
Sensitivity, Neurodivergence, and Relationships
Relationships can activate many of these patterns.
You may become preoccupied with whether someone is upset with you or need reassurance when a relationship feels uncertain. You may become overwhelmed by conflict or have difficulty recovering from emotionally intense interactions.
Or you may need distance, quiet, predictability, explicit communication, or time to process before you know what you think or feel.
You may have spent years masking, accommodating, people-pleasing, withdrawing, overexplaining, or trying to become easier for other people to understand.
Attachment experiences can add another layer.
Therapy can help you understand what happens inside you in relationships, communicate what you need more clearly, and develop ways of staying connected to other people without abandoning yourself.
How Therapy Can Help Highly Sensitive and Neurodivergent Adults
Our work may help you:
understand your sensitivity or neurodivergence more deeply
reduce anxiety and chronic overthinking
recognize sensory and emotional overwhelm earlier
strengthen boundaries and reduce people-pleasing
work through perfectionism and self-criticism
develop greater self-trust
understand anxious, avoidant, or other attachment patterns
identify your needs before automatically adapting to someone else
find strategies that better fit the way you naturally function
reduce shame around needing structure, predictability, solitude, or recovery time
recover from chronic masking, over-functioning, or burnout
communicate more clearly in relationships
reconnect with creativity, desire, play, and parts of yourself that have been pushed aside
create a life that fits you rather than continually forcing yourself to fit one that doesn't
My Approach to Therapy
I am a licensed clinical psychologist who works especially well with thoughtful, sensitive, creative, and psychologically minded adults.
My approach is relational, psychodynamic, attachment-informed, trauma-informed, and somatically oriented.
That means we are interested not only in reducing symptoms, but in understanding the deeper patterns underneath them.
We may explore your current relationships and challenges, early attachment experiences, the ways you learned to protect yourself, what happens in your body when you become threatened or overwhelmed, and the parts of yourself that may not have had enough room to develop.
When neurodivergence is part of your experience, we can also look at the ways you may have learned to mask, compensate, push through, or organize yourself around expectations that do not fit you particularly well.
Our work is not about explaining every difficulty through your childhood—or every difficulty through neurodivergence.
It is about understanding the interaction between who you are, how you process the world, what has happened to you, your relationships, and the life you are living now.
When appropriate, I may also incorporate EMDR and the Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP) into our ongoing psychotherapy.
I tend to be active and engaged in the therapy room. Depth matters to me, but so does change. We can understand the past while also paying attention to what is happening now and what you want to create going forward.
You Don't Need to Become Less Sensitive—or More “Normal”
You may need to understand yourself differently.
To become less ashamed of your needs.
Less governed by other people's reactions and expectations.
Less willing to override yourself simply because someone else seems able to tolerate something you cannot.
Less likely to interpret difference as deficiency.
And more able to experience the way you are as one part of a complex psychological life—alongside your intelligence, creativity, relationships, ambition, sexuality, interests, intuition, and capacity for depth.
The goal of therapy isn't to turn down everything you feel or make you perform normalcy more successfully.
It is to help you develop enough self-understanding, regulation, self-acceptance, and self-trust to create a life and relationships that fit you more authentically.
FAQs
Is being a Highly Sensitive Person the same as being autistic or having ADHD?
1
No. High sensitivity, autism, and ADHD are not interchangeable concepts. A person may identify as highly sensitive without being neurodivergent, may be autistic or ADHD without identifying as highly sensitive, or may identify with both.
Therapy can help us understand your individual experience without assuming that one framework explains everything.
Do I need to identify as an HSP, empath, autistic, or ADHD to work with you?
2
No. Many people recognize the experiences described on this page without identifying with a particular label.
You do not need to arrive knowing exactly why you experience the world the way you do. That curiosity can be part of the work.
Can therapy help with both neurodivergence and anxiety?
3
Yes. Anxiety can occur alongside ADHD, autism, high sensitivity, attachment difficulties, or other experiences. Therapy can help us understand which patterns may be related to anxiety, which may reflect your natural way of processing the world, and how the two interact in your particular life.
How can I contact you?
4
You can reach us anytime via our contact page or email. We aim to respond quickly—usually within one business day.
Online Therapy for HSPs, Empaths & Neurodivergent Adults in California
My practice is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and is fully virtual. I provide online psychotherapy to adults throughout California.
You may identify as highly sensitive.
You may consider yourself an empath.
You may be autistic, ADHD, AuDHD, or otherwise neurodivergent.
You may identify with several of these experiences—or none of the labels while recognizing yourself in what you have read here.
You don't need to arrive with a perfect explanation for why you experience the world the way you do.
We can begin there.