Individual Therapy · Maryland & North Carolina
Your symptoms aren't defects.
They are survival strategies.
The Approach
What actually
changes.
At Polaris, you will not find a blank-slate clinician. Your therapist is warm, curious, and will notice the thing you just glossed over. After in-session exploration, you will often leave with something concrete to try, something to notice, or a resource in your inbox.
Where you are
The first few sessions are spent understanding who you are, where you have been, and where you want to go. Your cultural context, your history, your strengths and resources, and what has and has not worked all factor into that picture. From there, your therapist will share what she is seeing and together you will build a collaborative working plan.
Where you're going
Most people arrive exhausted and overwhelmed. Often uncertain about what they actually want, and sometimes feeling like life has been happening to them rather than chosen by them. The early work is about reducing symptoms and building stability. From there, many people want to look at the patterns — how they are showing up, where that came from, and what gets in the way of doing things differently. For some, the work eventually opens into a bigger question: what do you actually want your life to look like, and why?
How we get there
Each session builds on the last, but no two look the same. You bring what is on your mind — a situation from the week, something you have been sitting with for a while, or whatever felt most pressing when you woke up that morning. Your therapist holds the goals and the tools, and will connect what you bring to the larger patterns underneath.
Who We Work With
Do you recognize
yourself here?
High-Achieving Professionals & Burnout
You are in a demanding field, and your mind is one of your greatest assets. It is also the thing that keeps you up at night, literally. The same processing speed that makes you exceptional at your job does not have an off switch. The pace, the pressure, and the expectation that you will simply absorb whatever the job throws at you have been accumulating longer than you want to admit. Here is the thing about operating at full speed all the time: the margin for error disappears. One small thing throws you off and suddenly you are putting out fires instead of doing the work. The paradox is that slowing down does not cost you performance. Most people leave this work sharper, with more capacity to show up for themselves, their work, and the people they love.
Perfectionism & People-Pleasing
You say yes when you mean no. You hold yourself to a standard nobody else could meet. And somewhere along the way, being helpful or being successful became the only way. It works, but at what cost. Underneath is usually a fear that if you stop, if you drop the ball, if you say no, if you are just ordinary for a moment, you will lose the people and the respect you are working so hard to keep.
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents
You could read the room before you knew what that meant. You knew by the sound of footsteps, the way dishes were being washed, the silence at dinner. You adapted. At some point you became the dependable one, the person who holds it together and does not need anything from anyone. Now you find yourself shrinking in some rooms and overextending in others, running on a voice in your head that is never quite satisfied and often very harsh. You are functional, likely highly successful, and also depleted. And you have started to wonder what is going on here.
High-Functioning Anxiety
Your brain does not really have an off switch. There is always another thing to think about, another potential problem to get ahead of, another demand coming from somewhere. People in your life have probably always said you had so much potential. You know they are right. From the outside you look productive. What they do not see is the second-guessing, the procrastination, the tasks that sit untouched not because you do not care but because starting feels impossible. You know what you are capable of. That gap between what you know you could do and what you actually manage to do is its own kind of exhausting.
Young Adults in Transition
Everyone around you seems to know what they are doing. You have more options than any previous generation and somehow that makes it harder, not easier. There is the pressure to excel right now, academically, professionally, socially, while simultaneously having your entire future mapped out. The relationships around you are shifting. The expectations are loud, specific, and coming from every direction. And the worst part may be that you have been carrying all of this alone.
Healthcare Professionals & Those Navigating the System
You spend your days inside a system that is demanding, high-stakes, and largely indifferent to the mental and physical wellbeing of the people operating within it. Or you have been on the other side of it, navigating it for yourself or someone you love. You will not have to spend your session explaining what an attending is or what a thirty-six hour shift actually does to a person. Your therapist grew up the daughter of a physician and a nurse, spent her childhood floating around hospitals, nursing homes, and a family medicine practice, and then kept going — volunteering extensively in the emergency department, completing nursing school coursework, and working in outpatient psychiatry research including suicide prevention and clinical trials. She knows the culture, the hierarchy, and the particular exhaustion of this world, whether you are the one providing the care or the one fighting to receive it. You can just talk.
A Note on Fit
Finding the
right therapist.
Not seeing yourself above or thinking we may not be the right place for you? No problem. Here are other options.
When another provider may serve you better
- You are struggling with substances in a way that has become hard to control or is significantly disrupting your daily life
- You are struggling with food or your body in a way that may require more specialized support than talk therapy alone
- You are in a place where you may need more support than weekly outpatient therapy can provide
- You are seeking therapy primarily to satisfy a legal or professional requirement
Find a therapist
Practices
Maryland
North Carolina
- Coming soon