For High-Achieving, Anxious Helping Professionals

You're capable, driven, deeply responsible, and relied upon by others — yet feel anxious, depleted, or disconnected in your closest relationships. As a high-achieving professional, you're skilled at managing everything for everyone else, including caring for others, but struggle to rest, receive care, or do for yourself without feeling guilty. We offer depth-oriented Jungian, Internal Family Systems (IFS) and relational and attachment-based therapy for high-achieving women who want to soften perfectionism, repair relational patterns, and reconnect with a deeper, more authentic sense of self.

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For The Woman Who Tries To Hold It All Together For Everyone — Except Herself

You're capable, intelligent, and deeply responsible.

Others often rely on you — your clients, your patients, your colleagues, your family, your partner, your friends, your children.

From the outside, your life looks successful — like you have it all together.

From the inside, it feels relentlessly tense and overwhelming — like you're always on the edge of it all falling apart.

You think ahead, manage crises, anticipate needs. You stay composed. You perform well. And yet, in your closest relationships — with your husband, your children, your family — you feel unseen, uncared for, resentful, lonely, or emotionally exhausted.

You may wonder why intimacy feels so hard when you are so attuned to others.

Why rest feels so undeserved.

Why your body carries so much anxiety, vigilance, or fatigue.

And why, despite everything you know and do for others, you struggle to feel cared for by anyone else... even yourself.

When Competence Becomes A Burden...

As a highly driven, over-achieving, helping professional — perhaps a psychotherapist, nurse, massage therapist, educator, or caregiver — you are skilled at holding emotional space and caring for others. You strive to over-perform and support everyone else at the expense of yourself. You may identify as needing to be "the strong one" in your family and in the workplace. The one who has to stuff it all down and keep up appearances that everything is fine when it's not.

Yet knowing how to care for and heal others isn't the same as being able to support and heal ourselves.

Perfectionism, over-functioning, and chronic self-reliance often develop early — the necessary adaptations that helped you succeed, belong, or survive — over time, these patterns can quietly erode your relationships and disconnect you from others and from your own inner and outer life.

You may notice:

Persistent anxiety or inner pressure, even when things are "fine"
Difficulty receiving support or expressing needs without guilt
Emotional distance or recurring conflict in your marriage & relationships
Irritability, overwhelm, or numbness with your children
Feeling stuck in cycles of overwhelm and burnout
Thinking there has to be more to life than this
A sense you've lost touch with who you are beneath the roles

Something in you knows there is more — more aliveness, more depth, more truth, more care.

A Healing Space For You To Reconnect With Yourself

My approach is unique as it's grounded in Jungian and depth psychology, which means we listen not only to symptoms (anxiety, depression, tension), but to meaning (the inherit value and wisdom of what these parts of you are communicating). Together, we attend to the unconscious patterns, relational dynamics, and inner figures shaping your life — often outside of your awareness.

This is not quick-fix therapy. Though you'll learn lots of skills to support yourself and enhance your relationships.

It is thoughtful, relational, emotionally engaged, and tends to your psyche.

In our work, you're not required to be the expert, the caretaker, or the composed one. You are invited to slow down, to feel, to reflect, and to explore the parts of you that have been carrying too much for too long. We integrate Internal Family Systems and relational and attachment-based approaches to support you in understanding and exploring how you got here, how to move forward, and how to let go.

We may work with:

Relationship patterns and attachment wounds
Anxiety and perfectionism rooted in early family dynamics
Identity loss in motherhood or caregiving roles
Worries & fears of vulnerability and intimacy in close relationships
Dreams, symbols, and the psyche's deeper language and what they're communicating to you
The tension between who you've had to be and who you are becoming

This is a space where complexity is welcome — and where you don't have to perform.

What Becomes Possible...

Over time, many women who work with me find they're able to:

Relate more authentically and less defensively with their partner
Feel emotionally present with their children without depletion
Set boundaries without excessive guilt or self-criticism
Experience rest, pleasure, and self-care as necessary — not indulgent or selfish
Step into a new way of living and being
Feel like they're showing up more consciously for themselves and their loved ones
Reconnect with a deeper sense of self beyond achievement and responsibility — more wholeness

This work supports not just symptom relief, but psychological maturation — a movement toward wholeness, integration, and a more sustainable way of living and loving and showing up for others without sacrificing yourself.

Who You'll Be Supported By...

Dr. Melissa George, MA, PhD, LMFT
I bring over two decades of experience as a clinician, researcher, and university educator, with a depth-oriented, Jungian psychoanalytic approach blending developmental science to couples and family work. Attachment and relationships in the context of healthy families is my specialization.

As a Jungian psychotherapist trained in Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, I'll help you discover your unconscious patterns (shadow work) and get unstuck in your relationships with others and yourself. I blend the scientific with the spiritual, the analytical with the emotional, and will support you in gaining more clarity, equanimity, meaning, and connection in your life. I'll help you create a new life from within. We'll explore your shadow, befriend your worries, let go of unhealthy patterns, and discover the depths of who you are to build more satisfying relationships, meaning, and purpose.

As a developmental scientist specializing in attachment theory, relationships, family of origin, including patterns of addiction, dysfunction, and emotional immaturity/personality disorders in families, I bring psychoeducation in understanding how you've developed patterns and ways of relating to others and to yourself. I'll help you critically reflect on your life, explore new ways of living, and become who you're truly meant to be.

I also carry the identities of being an anxious partner, a stepmom, a high-achiever and perfectionist in recovery, an adult child of emotionally immature parents, a divorcee, a woman without biological children, queer, and more, as I accompany you on your journey.

This lived experience informs my sensitivity and understanding of you and your relational complexity. It gives me a deep understanding of where you've been and what you're going through. And I've personally vetted the tools and practical strategies to navigate what you're going through. I can offer a different kind of hope for you and your relationships because I've been there too.

Is This Work Right For You?

This therapeutic approach is intentional, yet organic — exploratory, deep, and it can be incredibly profound. I tend to work best with women who are psychologically minded, curious about their inner world, and ready to invest in gaining a better understanding of themselves and their relationships with others. Those seeking to create meaningful, long-lasting change. Those who feel stuck, but have tried everything. They find themselves in the same ruts, so they're ready for something different, deeper, and more transformative.

If you're seeking a reflective, depth-oriented, inner exploration of yourself and your relationship dynamics — and are open to looking beneath the surface of your struggles — I invite you to reach out.

You don’t have to keep doing it alone.

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