The family you carry inside you.
You left home years ago. But the roles you learned there, the caretaker, the peacekeeper, the invisible one, the one who never needed anything, followed you into every relationship you have built since.
Family of origin therapy is the work of understanding how the family you grew up in shaped the person you became. Not as an intellectual exercise, but as a lived, felt, embodied reckoning with the patterns that are still running your life.
Most people who come to this work do not arrive saying "I need family of origin therapy." They arrive saying "I keep ending up in the same kind of relationship," or "I cannot stop taking care of everyone," or "something is wrong and I cannot name it." The family of origin is what we find underneath.
What family of origin patterns look like in adult life
- Caretaking everyone around you while your own needs go unmet
- Difficulty setting boundaries without guilt or anxiety
- Choosing partners who mirror the emotional unavailability of a parent
- Perfectionism or overachievement as a way of earning love
- A chronic feeling of being responsible for other people's emotions
- Difficulty trusting, even in safe relationships
- Minimizing your own pain because "other people had it worse"
- Parentification: having been the parent to your own parent
These are not character flaws. They are adaptations. They were the best strategies available to a child navigating a family system that required them to be something other than themselves in order to stay connected.
The mother wound and family of origin work
For many people, the deepest family of origin material centers on the relationship with the mother. The mother who could not attune. The mother who needed you to take care of her. The mother who was present but emotionally absent. The mother who loved you and could not see you at the same time. This is the territory of the mother wound, and it is often the center of gravity in family of origin work.
But family of origin work is broader than the mother wound alone. It includes the father who was physically present and emotionally gone. The sibling dynamics that cast you in a role you never chose. The family culture that prized achievement over feeling, or togetherness over individuality, or silence over truth. The intergenerational patterns that were handed down before anyone had language for what was happening.
How I work with family of origin material
I practice from a relational, psychoanalytically-informed lens, which means I am interested in how your early relationships live inside your present ones. The patterns that formed in your family of origin do not stay in the past. They show up in the therapy room, between us, in real time. The way you anticipate my responses, the things you are careful not to say, the moments where you take care of me instead of yourself. These are not problems. They are the material.
This work also draws on a liberatory, intersectional feminist lens. Family patterns do not form in a vacuum. They form inside cultures, economies, and power structures that shape what families are able to give. Understanding the systems around the family is part of understanding the family.
I also work with childhood emotional neglect, anxious attachment, and the grief that comes when you begin to see your family clearly for the first time.
You do not have to forgive your family to heal from them. You have to grieve what they could not give you. That is different, and it is harder, and it is the work.
Sessions are $150, Fridays, 8 AM to 4 PM. In-person in Seattle and telehealth throughout Washington State.
If something here is resonating, I would welcome a conversation.
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