Hi, I’m Allison.
IL LCSW #149.024650| LA LCSW #11080| PMH-C #PSI5247 she/her/hers
I’m a licensed clinical social worker based in Chicago, practicing throughout Illinois & Louisiana*, with over 15 years of experience supporting high-achieving people who often hold healing, helping, or leadership roles. I work with clients navigating trauma, burnout, identity shifts, loss, and the ongoing challenge of showing up for others while trying to stay intact yourself.
As a perinatal mental health-certified therapist since 2020, I’ve supported clients through fertility challenges, pregnancy and infant loss, and postpartum transitions. That work taught me something bigger: the patterns of self-sacrifice, isolation, and impossible expectations that show up in new parenthood are the same patterns that show up in caregiving, leadership, and high-achievement more broadly.
Those lessons now inform how I help all my clients stop bending themselves to systems that demand endless labor, reclaim their time and energy, and refuse to perform self-sacrifice as a moral requirement.
In our work together, I bring a trauma-informed, politicized, and relational lens. My approach integrates EMDR, parts work, somatics, attachment theory, identity context, and nervous system literacy. It’s not one-size-fits-all, it’s grounded, collaborative, and built to move at the pace of your capacity. We get curious together about how you’ve learned to navigate the world. We name what’s real. We let humor into the room. We build the kind of therapy relationship that doesn’t make you perform in order to earn care.
I work with:
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I work with: *
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You’re a parent, activist, teacher, nurse, or other helping professional and you’ve learned how to stay functional no matter what’s happening around you. And, uh, there’s a lot happening in the world around you.
You’re good at anticipating needs, smoothing things over, and giving until that damn cup is dry. You probably learned early on that being responsible was safer than being needy. Over time, that turned into saying yes to any request, chronic guilt when you rest, and a nervous system that never quite believes you’re doing enough.
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You’re intuitive, thoughtful, and deeply empathic. You might be a therapist, coach, bodyworker, birth worker, or spiritual care provider. You understand trauma—sometimes too well—and you’re often holding space for others while quietly struggling yourself.
You may feel burned out, disillusioned, or resentful, then ashamed for feeling that way. You know all the tools, yet still find yourself exhausted, anxious, or disconnected from your own body. You tell yourself that you should be able to handle this better because of your skills, but sometimes you think you know too much.
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You’re not Type A, you’re Type A+.
You’re driven, capable, and used to being “the one who gets it done.” You might be an executive, entrepreneur, founder, or values-led professional who carries real responsibility—and rarely feels allowed to fall apart.
From the outside, it looks like success. On the inside, it can feel like constant pressure, imposter syndrome, or a sense that if you slow down, everything will collapse. You’ve likely been praised for your resilience while quietly paying the cost in your body, relationships, or sense of self.
How We Do It:
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(unlearning survival as a lifestyle)
Most of my clients are highly capable because they had to be. This phase is about slowing down the overfunctioning that capitalism, patriarchy, and family systems reward—and that your nervous system learned to rely on. We resource internally and externally to reduce chronic “busyness,” reconnect you to your body, and build enough internal steadiness that rest doesn’t feel like danger.
Translation: You stop living like everything is an emergency—without giving up your values.
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(about trauma, context, and power)
Here, we make sense of how you learned to survive by being responsible, competent, and self-sacrificing. Through parts work, somatic tracking, EMDR, and relational depth, we connect personal history to larger systems that shaped your role: family dynamics, identity, trauma, and the cultural conditions that taught you to earn safety through usefulness. This often includes grief, anger, and re-claiming parts of yourself that were never allowed to matter.
Translation: The problem stops living only inside you.
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(living your values without burning out)
Healing isn’t about opting out of the world, it’s about re-entering it with more choice, more connection, and more roots. In this phase, we focus on integration and rebuilding: clarifying what you stand for, what you refuse, and how to stay engaged without sacrificing yourself. We lean into your intuition, reclaim lost rituals and rhythms, honor intergenerational and cultural lineages, and cultivate collective care alongside personal boundaries and sustainable engagement.
Translation: You get to help rebuild the world, stay connected to yourself and your people, and refuse to disappear in the process.
At this point in my practice, I prioritize longer-term work. I may not be the best fit for someone looking for brief, solution-focused therapy, or a therapist who stays silent in the face of harm. I’m not a healer or a blank slate. I’m a real person with clinical depth, a sharp bullshit meter, and a strong belief in your wholeness.
My Values
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You weren’t meant to compartmentalize your life, and I won’t do that in our work together either. Your story, your body, your history, your politics, your identity, your relationships, they all show up in the room. Therapy with me is about making space for the full truth of who you are. We might draw from your nervous system, your family lineage, your spiritual life, your rage, your dreams- whatever feels relevant and real.
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There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to being a human. And there’s no single path to healing. I view therapy as an inherently creative process- one where we experiment, imagine, adapt, and make meaning together. We don’t just work to “fix” what’s broken. We get curious about what you want to build. Whether it’s a new relationship with yourself, a different way of parenting, or a version of rest you’ve never been allowed before, we’ll shape the work around your values, your desires, and your inner wisdom.
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You don’t have to perform in this space. You don’t have to make it palatable, pretty, or polite. I welcome the mess, the contradictions, the parts you think are too much. And I’ll show up as a full person, too: honest, direct, and sometimes a little irreverent. I won’t pretend to have all the answers. But I will sit with you in the questions. I trust that you already carry so much of what you need, and my job is to help you access it, not impose my version of healing onto you.
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Our suffering doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and neither does our healing. I practice from a trauma-informed, anti-oppressive framework that names the real forces at play: capitalism, white supremacy, ableism, gendered expectations, colonization, and all the systems that disconnect us from ourselves and each other. Therapy with me isn’t about adjusting to a broken world. It’s about finding ways to live, relate, and heal that honor your humanity- and move us closer to collective freedom. As my teacher Shawna Murray-Browne says, “Freedom is individual, liberation is in the collective.” That’s the work.
I believe:
That therapy can be a space of repair, reclamation, and reimagining.
It’s a place to honor your complexity, trust your nervous system, and name the cultural and systemic conditions that impact your wellbeing. Healing doesn’t require fixing who you are—it requires refusing to carry what’s not yours.
In your wholeness and the value of your care.
Your pain makes sense, your values deserve support, and you shouldn’t have to choose between being of service and being well. Caregiving is essential work, and healers need to be resourced, grounded, and sustained.
The systems, not you, are often at fault.
You’re responding to conditions that demand overwork, dissociation, and depletion. Therapy can help you process these pressures and reclaim agency, clarity, and a sense of safety in a world that often denies both.
Healing can be relational, honest, and expansive.
You deserve alignment in work and relationships, a nervous system that can rest, and permission to feel your full range of emotions. Therapy can be a space to do this work without going it alone, and a space to hold the whole truth of your experience.
*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 firecely, 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
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