Your body is the ground you walk on — not the obstacle.
A diagnosis changes the terrain. Treatment, remission, recurrence, or a condition that is simply yours for life — each asks something different of the mind, and each deserves company.
- You have a cancer diagnosis and the appointments are managed but the fear is not.
- Treatment ended and everyone expects you to feel like yourself again. You do not.
- You live with a chronic condition — pain, autoimmune, cardiac, neurological — and are tired of being brave about it.
- You are trying to talk with your family about diagnosis and expectations, and it keeps going wrong.
- You are facing end-of-life questions and want to think about them clearly, with someone who will not flinch.
Physical health and mental health are usually treated as two separate departments. They are not. Your beliefs, emotions, memories, and habits shape your physical health, and illness reshapes every one of them in return. That is the ground I trained on: a PhD in clinical health psychology, an internship and fellowship in a VA medical center, years of sitting with people whose bodies had become the main event.
Cancer in particular has a before and an after, and the after is where many people find themselves alone. The casseroles stop. The scans continue. “You look great” becomes hard to hear. The work here is to make room for all of it — the fear, the changed body, the family conversations that go sideways — and to find a way of living that is whole even when the body is not what it was.
Chronic illness asks something slightly different: not recovery, but a relationship with a condition that is staying. We work on that relationship directly.
- Fear of recurrence and the scans that keep it alive.
- Adjusting to a 'new normal' the body chose without asking.
- Talking with partners, children, and parents about illness, prognosis, and what you need.
- Guilt about being ill; anger at being ill; the identity that illness rearranges.
- The mind-body connection in practice: sleep, pain, stress, and what each does to the other.
- Legacy work — telling your story in a form that lasts, for the people who matter.
Bring the medical facts if you want to; I am trained as a health psychologist and can follow them. But the first hour is about you, not the chart — what changed, what you miss, and what you are afraid to say to the people around you.
What is a clinical health psychologist?
A psychologist trained specifically at the meeting point of physical illness and mental health — how each shapes the other. My PhD is in Clinical-Health Psychology, and I completed my internship and fellowship in a VA medical center working alongside medical teams. I do not treat the disease; I work with the person living inside it.
Do you coordinate with my oncologist or physician?
With your written permission, yes. Many people find it helpful for their medical team to know they have psychological support; others prefer to keep it separate. Your choice.
What is legacy therapy?
A form of palliative care that helps people who are aging or seriously ill tell their story — values, memories, what they want remembered — in a way that can be kept by family and friends. It is not only for the end of life; many people find it grounding at any stage.