The audience is right there. So is everything you're feeling about them.
You read the room in real time, every night, and adjust without anyone seeing you do it. That's the skill. It's also a lot to carry when you can never quite put it down. The work looks like the fun part from the outside, the lights and the applause. Inside, you're tracking a hundred small signals and deciding in the moment what to give them.
Then there's the other side of it. Walking off stage wired with nowhere to put all that, and sitting in a green room or a hotel room while it drains out of you. The bad night, the set that dies, and the spiral right after that says maybe you were never any good. The run that closes, when the cast scatters and the nightly thing that shaped your whole day is suddenly gone, and nobody warns you how much you'll miss the structure.
Underneath the performing, there's usually something older. A lot of the people I work with came up in some kind of chaos and learned early to read a room and become whatever it needed. That instinct is part of why you're good on a stage. It's also exhausting to never fully turn off.
Some of what brings people to me
- The high and the comedown. Coming off stage lit up, and then the flat hours after, when there's nowhere to put any of it.
- The bad night. One dead set or a cold house, and the voice that says maybe you were never good at this.
- The run ending. A show closes, the people you got close to scatter, and the nightly thing that held your week together is gone.
- The bending. Saying yes to the gig, the schedule, the booker, the late load-out, long past the point you wanted to, because the next booking can feel conditional on being easy.
How I work
I'm not a performer, and I won't pretend the stage shaped me the way it shaped you. What I bring is the clinical side. I came to this work through the people in it, musicians and actors who were close to me, and the practice grew from there.
I'm not the kind of therapist who sits quietly and waits. I'll ask questions, point things out, name what I'm noticing, and offer frameworks when they'll help. We'll use attachment theory to make sense of why the same patterns keep showing up, and I'll teach it to you in plain language as we go. You don't have to walk in already knowing the vocabulary.
Sessions work around your schedule. I see people in person in West Hollywood and Pasadena, and over telehealth anywhere in California, including when you're on tour or out of town for a run.