“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 well-being. It’s creative work that takes courage and commitment and it ends with a renewed sense of emotional freedom and increased self-acceptance.
Unfortunately, traditional therapy fails to acknowledge the social context within which women live. We are often diagnosed with anxiety, depression, postpartum depression, or sexual dysfunction without ever having meaningfully explored how our mental health is affected by the expectations and limitations placed on us. 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 know the truth of their own lives and to make their own choices. I encourage women to re-author their narratives in their own voices.
When you and I work together, we’ll draw from a variety of creative approaches including:
Psychotherapy Designed for Women’s Needs, which embraces the truth that women are the greatest source of wisdom and expertise about their own lives and places those lives in social, cultural, and relational context.
Couples Counseling / Marriage Therapy for One. Sometimes when a relationship is in trouble, one partner is unwilling to participate in relationship counseling or the therapy fails to fix the problem. Individual counseling can help you make decisions for yourself and for the future of your relationship..
Narrative Therapy, which centers women as the experts of their lived experiences and empowers us to identify the stories that have been imposed on us so that we can re-author them in our own voices.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), 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.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a mindfulness-based approach that helps us be fully present with our moment-to-moment experience in a curious, non-judgmental way and is very effective in working with anxiety.
Internal Family Systems (IFS), which enables us to connect to the wounded parts of ourselves and identify how past experiences are affecting our emotions and behaviors.
