Therapist, coach, and builder of more sustainable ways to live and lead.
Allison Staiger | IL LCSW #149.024650| LA LCSW #11080| she/her/hers
I’m a Licensed Clinical Social Worker based in Chicago, practicing throughout Illinois and Louisiana, with over 15 years of experience supporting high-achieving people in helping, healing, and leadership roles. My work focuses on trauma, burnout, identity shifts, grief, and the ongoing tension of trying to show up for others without losing yourself in the process.
For six years, I specialized in perinatal mental health, supporting clients through fertility challenges, pregnancy and infant loss, and postpartum transitions. That work clarified something I see across all areas of my practice: the patterns of self-sacrifice, over-responsibility, and impossible standards that emerge in new parenthood are the same patterns shaping caregiving, leadership, and high achievement more broadly.
That perspective informs everything I do now—supporting clients who are at a threshold: still functioning, still holding it together, but no longer able to unsee the cost of how they’ve been living and leading.
How I show up:
I show up directly, relationally, and without shaming. I don’t position you as a problem to fix or a project to optimize. I’m paying attention to patterns, context, and systems—but I’m also paying attention to you as a person, not a case.
This is collaborative work. I’m not here to take over your process or push you faster than you can go. I will also not collude with the parts of you that have learned to disappear, perform, or over-explain in order to be okay.
There’s room for honesty, complexity, and humor—because we’re working with your real life, not an ideal version of it.
I Work With:
I work most often with the responsible ones, the emotional anchors, and the ones in charge — women at a threshold, still functioning, still holding it together, but no longer able to unsee what it's costing them. If you want to see whether you recognize yourself there, you can read more on the home page.
Why This Work Exists:
I do this work because I’ve seen how often capable, high-responsibility people are rewarded for overfunctioning until it stops being sustainable. What looks like strength on the outside is often a long pattern of self-abandonment that eventually starts to show up as burnout, anxiety, disconnection, or a quiet sense that something is no longer working.
I’m less interested in helping people “cope better” inside those patterns, and more interested in what becomes possible when they start to see those patterns clearly enough to choose differently.
My Approach
I hold burnout and overfunctioning as relational and systemic experiences, not personal failures. They're shaped by environments that reward self-abandonment in the name of competence, care, and leadership. Healing doesn't happen outside of context — we look at how your patterns make sense in relation to the systems, relationships, and expectations you've been moving through.
Therapy with me is a space for repair and reclamation, not optimization. It's a place where you can stop translating your experience into something more palatable and start telling the truth about what it's actually costing you to function the way you do.
My work is grounded in integration, creativity, liberation, and clarity — not as abstract values, but as lived practice. We don't separate your nervous system from your history, or your identity from your environment. There's room here for the full complexity of who you are, without asking you to simplify it in order to be understood.
What changes when you work with me:
You step off the edge of "I can handle it" before it turns into depletion or resentment.
You make decisions from alignment, not obligation or the need to keep everyone else comfortable.
You stop building a life that looks good on paper and start building one you don't need to recover from.
Your life becomes more honest, more textured, more alive — even if it's less polished or impressive from the outside.
You learn to stay with complexity without defaulting to overfunctioning, self-abandonment, or exit.
*Why Louisiana?
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*Why Louisiana? *
Although I am a born-and-bred Chicagoan, I spent almost fifteen years living, working, and reveling in New Orleans. I went to grad school at Tulane, got my original LCSW license in Louisiana, and opened up my practice there. I was even one of the first PMH-Cs in the state (very glad that’s changed). When I moved back home to Chicago in 2022, I let my Louisiana license expire, and then last year I thought…”why did I do that?,” and reinstated it.
Although I’ve chosen to return to my roots, I love New Orleans fiercely, and have a great respect for the distinct culture, the spirit(uality), and the people. It’s where I learned about trauma, both formally and implicitly, and how I learned to celebrate life with reverence and respect. I miss living there, but I stay connected to my people, both personal and professional.
So if you live in New Orleans and want a therapist who you won’t run into at the Breaux Mart, but who also knows how to boil crawfish, danced in Muses for five years, and can pronounce Tchoupitoulas, I’m your gal.
Let’s work together
Ready to have a consultation call or get started? Fill out this form and I will get back to you within one business day.