Joy Strickland

You can be surrounded by people and still feel completely alone. Maybe you grew up keeping the peace, managing everyone else's emotions, or shrinking yourself to avoid conflict, and now those same patterns are running your life. You overthink, you people-please, you second-guess yourself constantly. You're self-aware enough to know something isn't working, but knowing hasn't been enough to change it. These patterns make sense. Family wounds, early trauma, relationships that taught you it wasn't safe to be yourself. None of it was your fault, and all of it is workable. If you're a young adult ready to actually shift these patterns instead of just understanding them, you're in the right place. Maybe you're the one everyone calls when they're falling apart, but you have no idea who you'd call. Maybe you look fine, get the grades, keep the friends, and still lie awake at 3 a.m. convinced you're somehow behind. Maybe you go home for break and slip right back into the role you've always played in your family, then wonder why you feel twelve years old again. That stuff is exactly what we work on. I help self-aware young adults move past insight into real change. Using EMDR, parts work, CBT, and DBT, we work directly with the family and relational patterns driving your anxiety, people-pleasing, and self-doubt at the nervous-system level, not just intellectually. Sessions are collaborative and skills-focused. We go at your pace, but we go somewhere. You don't have to white-knuckle this alone, and you don't have to wait until it gets bad enough to "count." Because we work via secure telehealth across New York and Vermont, we keep going when you're home for the summer, studying abroad, or starting over in a new city after graduation. And if you've outgrown a few short sessions at the campus counseling center and want deeper, ongoing work, I'm often the next step. For clients ready for focused, concentrated work, I also offer half-day Reset Intensives: EMDR sessions built to move through one specific stuck pattern in a single half-day. You're not broken, and you don't need more insight. You need a space to finally shift what's been stuck. If you're ready to stop performing a version of yourself and start building a life that actually feels like yours, reach out.