Individual Therapy
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Sometimes you know something isn’t quite right, even if you can’t fully explain what it is.
You may feel anxious, overwhelmed, disconnected, stuck in self-doubt, or simply unlike yourself lately. Maybe you’re carrying more than other people realize, questioning your choices, or noticing the same patterns repeating even though you genuinely want something to change.
These struggles can affect your relationships, work, confidence, and daily life. You might find yourself overthinking, people-pleasing, withdrawing, reacting more strongly than you expect, or having trouble knowing what you actually need.
Individual therapy gives you a private, supportive space to slow down, understand what’s happening beneath the surface, and begin making meaningful, lasting change.
What Is Individual Therapy?
Individual therapy, also called talk therapy, one-on-one therapy, individual counseling, or psychotherapy, is a form of mental health treatment where you meet privately with a trained therapist.
Unlike group therapy, individual therapy focuses entirely on your experiences, concerns, and therapeutic goals. Sessions move at your own pace and can address emotional health, behavior patterns, past experiences, relationships, and challenges affecting daily life.
People seek therapy for many reasons, including anxiety, low self-esteem, family patterns, relationship concerns, life transitions, or simply feeling stuck. You don’t need a diagnosed mental health condition to benefit. Wanting to understand yourself better is reason enough to begin.
What Are the Goals of Individual Therapy?
The goals of individual therapy are different for every person.
For some, therapy means learning to manage anxiety or develop healthier coping skills. For others, it means building self-esteem, understanding deeply rooted patterns, improving relationships, or becoming more confident in their own choices.
Together, we’ll develop personalized therapeutic goals based on what matters to you. Those goals can evolve as the therapeutic process unfolds.
Individual therapy may help you:
- Understand patterns that keep repeating
- Develop healthy coping skills and coping strategies
- Strengthen self-esteem and self-acceptance
- Improve emotional regulation
- Set healthier boundaries
- Communicate your needs more clearly
- Manage negative thoughts and emotional overwhelm
- Feel more confident making decisions
- Build healthier relationships with yourself and others
- Move toward greater personal growth and emotional well-being
Successful treatment doesn’t mean never feeling anxious or uncertain. It means understanding yourself more clearly and having more ways to respond when life becomes difficult.
When Should You Seek Therapy?
You don’t need to wait until something becomes severe before seeking therapy.
It may be helpful to reach out when thoughts, feelings, behaviors, or relationship patterns begin causing distress or interfering with daily life. Sometimes there isn’t one obvious problem. You simply feel off, disconnected from yourself, or tired of responding in the same ways.
That is enough of a reason to begin.
My Approach to Individual Therapy
My work is relational, attachment-focused, emotionally focused, psychodynamic, humanistic, and trauma-informed.
Rather than looking at a symptom in isolation, we look at you as a whole person, including your history, relationships, emotional patterns, cultural background, and the ways you learned to cope.
As a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, I bring specialized training in how relationships and family systems influence individual emotional lives.
Many patterns that create difficulty today originally developed for a reason. People-pleasing may have helped you avoid conflict. Withdrawal may have protected you when expressing yourself didn’t feel safe.
Those coping strategies may have been useful then. They may not be serving you now.
Individual therapy gives us a nonjudgmental space to understand those patterns while building healthier ways of relating to yourself and others.
Psychodynamic and Attachment-Focused Therapy
Psychodynamic therapy explores how past experiences and emotional patterns may influence your present-day thoughts, feelings, and behavior.
Attachment-focused therapy looks at how early relationships shaped your expectations around closeness, trust, conflict, and emotional safety.
The goal isn’t to stay focused on the past. It’s to understand how it may still be showing up now so you have more freedom to respond differently.
Different Types of Individual Therapy
There are many types of individual therapy, and no single treatment approach is right for everyone.
My therapeutic style draws primarily from relational, psychodynamic, attachment-focused, emotionally focused, humanistic, and trauma-informed approaches.
Finding the right therapist and treatment approach matters more than choosing a therapy simply because its name is familiar.
Areas of Focus in Individual Therapy
Anxiety and emotional overwhelm
Self-esteem and identity
People-pleasing and difficulty setting boundaries
Family issues and intergenerational patterns
Relationship Conflict
Life transitions
Emotional disconnection
Recurring relationship patterns
Personal Growth
The impact of difficult past experiences
Building emotional resilience
These concerns often overlap. Therapy gives us room to understand how the pieces fit together.
Benefits of Individual Therapy
One of the main benefits of individual therapy is having a private, one-on-one setting where the focus stays on you.
You don’t need to manage anyone else’s reactions, which can make it easier to discuss sensitive concerns.
Over time, individual therapy can help you become more self-aware, strengthen coping strategies, improve emotional regulation, build self-esteem, and gain greater self-acceptance.
The therapeutic relationship matters too. Therapy tends to be most useful when you feel safe, supported, understood, and able to be honest with your therapist. That relationship is part of the work, not separate from it.
Your First Therapy Session
Your first therapy session is primarily about getting to know you.
I’ll ask what brought you to therapy, what has been happening in your life, relevant past experiences, and what you hope might feel different. You’ll probably do more of the talking at first, but you don’t need to explain your entire life in one session.
Talking about things you don’t usually say out loud can bring emotions closer to the surface. We’ll move at a manageable pace.
I’ll also explain confidentiality and its limits. What you share in therapy is confidential, with limited exceptions required by federal or state law, including certain situations involving immediate danger or mandatory reporting.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know if individual therapy is right for me?
If you feel stuck, anxious, overwhelmed, uncertain about yourself, or caught in patterns you want to understand and change, individual therapy may be helpful.
You don’t need to be in crisis or have a diagnosed mental health condition to seek therapy.
What’s the difference between individual, couples, and group therapy?
Individual therapy focuses on you: your thoughts, emotions, history, behavior patterns, and therapeutic goals.
Couples therapy includes both partners and focuses primarily on the relationship. Group therapy involves several clients working with one or more therapists, often around shared concerns or experiences.
Some people value group interaction, while others prefer the privacy of one-on-one therapy. The right format depends on your goals.
What types of individual therapy are there?
There are many approaches to individual therapy, including Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), psychodynamic therapy, attachment-based therapy, humanistic therapy, and trauma-informed therapy.
I don’t use every type of therapy. My own work draws primarily from relational, psychodynamic, attachment-focused, emotionally focused, humanistic, and trauma-informed approaches. The free consultation gives us a chance to talk about whether my therapeutic approach is a good fit for your needs.
How many sessions will I need?
There is no set number that works for everyone.
Some people come with one focused concern, while others benefit from longer-term therapy because the patterns they want to change developed over many years.
We’ll review your treatment goals as therapy progresses rather than deciding the timeline in advance.
Is individual therapy confidential?
Yes. Confidentiality is a core part of individual counseling.
There are limited legal exceptions, which I’ll explain clearly before we begin treatment.
Do you offer individual therapy online?
Yes. My practice is entirely online, and I provide individual therapy to adults throughout California.
You can attend from home or another private space with a reliable internet connection.
What happens during the free consultation?
The free consultation is a brief conversation about what’s bringing you to therapy and what you’re looking for.
You can ask questions about my approach, and we can both get a sense of whether working together feels like a good fit.
[email protected]
Address:
Santa Barbara, CA 93103
Mon – Fri: 11am – 7pm
Sat: Closed
Sun: Closed
Begin Individual Therapy
You don’t have to know exactly what needs to change before starting therapy.
Sometimes the first step is simply recognizing that you don’t want to keep feeling or responding the same way.
Individual therapy can give you space to understand yourself more deeply, develop healthier ways of coping, and create change that extends beyond the therapy session into everyday life.
If my approach feels like it might be a good fit, I offer a free 15-minute consultation so we can talk about what you’re looking for and whether working together makes sense.