Therapy for Physicians in Durham, NC
I offer therapy to physicians in Durham and online throughout North Carolina.
Medicine selects for people who can carry a great deal without showing it, then trains that capacity until it becomes reflex. Somewhere in the years of training and practice, many physicians notice a distance opening — between competence and feeling, between the person who functions and the person who is tired in a way sleep does not reach.
You may be the one everyone else brings their worst day to. It can be genuinely unclear where you are supposed to bring yours.
What Brings Physicians In
Some physicians come with what anyone brings — anxiety, depression, grief, a marriage under strain, a question of meaning that outlasts the workday — and want a therapist who will not need the terrain of medicine explained: the hours, the hierarchy, the weight of decisions that do not stay at work.
Others come with concerns closer to the profession itself: the aftermath of a bad outcome and the private inquest that follows it; the erosion that gets called burnout, which is often something more particular than exhaustion; a career question — leaving, staying, changing — with no one safe to think it through aloud; or the discovery that the detachment that makes the work possible has followed you home.
And some come simply because they have spent years being the steady one and want a place that asks nothing of that steadiness.
A Private Setting
Physicians often hesitate to begin therapy for reasons that deserve to be taken seriously rather than reassured away. Mine is a private practice, independent of any hospital or health system, and I am glad to discuss questions about privacy and records directly — before you decide anything, if that would be useful.
Much of this is true well beyond physicians. Nurses, physician assistants, therapists, and others who do the holding in health care may recognize the terrain. This work is open to them too.
How I Work
I have worked with physicians and other health care professionals throughout more than twenty years of practice — surgeons, specialists, emergency physicians, and those in primary care — much of it here in Durham, where medicine is the other water everyone swims in.
My approach is grounded in psychodynamic therapy: listening for the history beneath a pattern and the protection inside a way of coping. This tends to suit people whose training has made them expert in the first account of things and curious, sometimes despite themselves, about the second.
The work is not to make you more resilient so that the same conditions can ask more of you. It is a private, unhurried place where the one who holds things can set them down and look at them.
Begin Therapy
You do not need to decide whether the problem is medicine, the conditions around it, or something that began long before either. We can begin with what has become difficult to carry alone.
Serving Durham · Chapel Hill · Raleigh · Hillsborough · Online across North Carolina
