“How might your life have been different if there had been a place for you . . . a place of women, where you were received and affirmed?”
Women Deserve Better Therapy.
If you’re thinking about starting therapy, you’ve taken the first step toward reclaiming your personal authority. This is creative work that takes courage and commitment and it ends with a renewed sense of trust in your own emotional and intellectual capabilities.
Unfortunately, traditional therapy fails to acknowledge the social context women live in. We are often diagnosed with anxiety, depression, postpartum depression, or sexual dysfunction without ever having explored how our mental health is affected by the expectations and limitations placed on us by our culture, our workplaces, and even our families. The harm that this does to women’s well-being is real and measurable.
Healing begins with acknowledging social influences and power structures and listening to women’s unique experiences and perspectives.
I’m Sheryl Lilke, a professional counselor in Madison, Wisconsin. I believe women’s stories. I honor women’s diverse ways of knowing. I trust women to make their own choices. I encourage women to create new personal narratives in their own voices.
When you and I work together, we’ll draw from a variety of creative approaches including:
Psychotherapy Created for Women’s Specific Needs: What changes when we examine our lives in the context of the expectations and limitations that social and relational power structures—such as male supremacy and household labor inequity—place upon us?
Couples Counseling / Marriage Therapy for One: Sometimes when a relationship is in trouble, one partner is unwilling to participate or therapy fails to fix the problem. Individual counseling can empower you to make decisions in your own best interest, free from the oppressive gender roles that couples therapy often reinforces..
Narrative Therapy / Power - Threat - Meaning Framework: When women center ourselves in our own life stories, it empowers us to identify the narratives that have been imposed on us so that we can re-create them in a way that connects us to our personal authority.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing: EMDR is a method of processing trauma that has been shown to reduce the negative effects of distressing memories. As a certified EMDR therapist, I have experience using EMDR to reduce symptoms of PTSD, C-PTSD, anxiety, depression, and attachment wounds.
