Individual Therapy
Relational, depth, and change-oriented therapy is within reach.
Trained in
Areas to Explore
Individual Therapy
For people who feel stuck, overwhelmed, disconnected, or ready to understand themselves more deeply.
Understand recurring emotional and relational patterns
Build greater self-awareness and emotional regulation
Create meaningful, sustainable change
Trauma-informed Therapy
For people carrying the effects of difficult early experiences, chronic stress, or relational wounds.
Understand how the past may still shape the present
Work with protective patterns, younger parts, and nervous-system responses
Build greater safety, flexibility, self-trust and empowerment
Identity, Relationships, & Life Transitions
For people navigating relationships, belonging, ambition, grief, change, or questions of what comes next.
Explore attachment, boundaries, and relationship patterns
Navigate identity, cultural complexes and belonging
Work through career transitions, grief, and major life changes
You’re functioning but something feels off.
You may be doing well enough on paper—working, showing up, maintaining some relationships—while internally feeling anxious, disconnected, overwhelmed, or unsure of what you actually want.
Individual therapy can help you understand the deeper patterns underneath what you’re experiencing, including attachment, family history, trauma, self-criticism, perfectionism, identity, and the ways you may have learned to protect yourself.
Therapy can help you understand what’s happening beneath the surface so you can begin relating to yourself and your life differently.
Modalities I Draw From
Different people need different kinds of support. I integrate depth-oriented and trauma-informed approaches with practical tools to help you understand what is happening beneath the surface—and create meaningful change.
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Exploring unconscious material, early relationships, family-of-origin blueprints, recurring patterns, and how the past continues to shape the present.
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Working with protective parts, younger parts, and internal conflicts. The goal is greater wholeness and personal power by letting go of what no longer serves us, healing the past, and becoming more fully present in our lives today.
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Noticing how and when stress and emotion show up in the body, while building greater regulation and awareness. This work helps connect mind and body to support the processing of stress and trauma. Exercises may include active imagination, art, visualization, or other experiential practices.
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Sometimes it is helpful to get practical with personal development, and this is where CBT can come into play. We identify thought and behavior patterns and develop concrete strategies for change.
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Similar to EMDR, Brainspotting uses focused visual attention and body awareness to access and process emotionally charged material. It can also be used with performance blocks, stress, and areas where a person feels “stuck.”
What Therapy Can Help With
Anxiety, overthinking & chronic stress
Working with worry, overwhelm, hypervigilance, control, and difficulty slowing down.
Relationship & attachment patterns
Understanding recurring patterns in dating, intimacy, trust, closeness, conflict, and relationships.
Trauma & difficult early experiences
Exploring how past experiences may continue to shape your nervous system, relationships, self-concept, and present-day reactions.
Perfectionism & over-functioning
Working with achievement pressure, self-criticism, productivity, control, and the feeling that you always have to hold everything together.
Grief & major life transitions
Navigating loss, endings, relocation, identity shifts, relationship changes, and periods of reinvention.
Identity, belonging & cultural complexity
Exploring who you are across cultures, relationships, family expectations, changing environments, and different stages of life.
Boundaries & people-pleasing
Understanding difficulty saying no, disappointing others, expressing needs, or feeling responsible for other people’s emotions.
Career, ambition & questions of meaning
Exploring burnout, career transitions, achievement, purpose, ambition, success, and the question of what comes next?
Getting Deeper
The Therapist Has to Do the Work, Too
Carl Jung believed that a therapist can only accompany a client as far as they have been willing to go themselves. That principle matters deeply to how I practice.
I believe it is the ethical responsibility of the therapist to do—and to continue doing, their own internal work. This informs how I show up in the room with clients.
The areas I specialize in are informed not only by professional training, but also by my own lived experience of moving through many of these themes. When you’re navigating trauma, relationships, identity, grief, or transformation, I believe there is value in sitting with someone who understands the depths from the inside.
Learn more about Doing Our Own Work: The Ethics of the Therapist as a Wounded Healer.
Individual Therapy Is More Than Symptom Relief
You may come to therapy because of anxiety, relationship difficulties, burnout, grief, or simply the sense that something in your life isn’t working.
But symptoms are often only the surface of what is happening.
Underneath may be attachment patterns, family-of-origin dynamics, old wounds, protective strategies, internalized expectations, or ways you learned to adapt in order to feel safe, successful, or connected.
In our work together, we may look not only at what you are struggling with, but at why the pattern developed, what purpose it has served, and what might become possible when you no longer need it in the same way.
About Stef Palumbo
I’m a depth-oriented, trauma-informed therapist who believes meaningful change comes from understanding both what is happening now and what has shaped you over time. My work is integrative, drawing from psychodynamic therapy, parts work, somatic via nervous-system approaches, and Brainspotting.
Therapy with me is warm, engaged, and collaborative. My view of therapy is this: no one knows you better than you—not even me, despite my training in psychology. I think of us as walking side by side through a forest. I may shine a flashlight ahead and say, “I see something over there. It might be worth looking at. Do you want to explore it?” I believe that autonomy is important and the sustaining quality in personal growth work.
Before becoming a therapist, I worked across creative industries, startups, and entrepreneurship, and later returned to graduate school to pursue psychotherapy as a second career. I also have a close relationship with grief through parental loss and terminal illness. I speak three languages, have lived in several countries across the globe, and am in a stable and fulfilling intercultural partnership. I bring that broader life experience into the room, and when I’m not head-deep in something psychology- or therapy-related, you’ll find me cooking, hiking, or off on a new adventure (likely in a new country).
Are You Ready for Something to Change?
Individual therapy isn’t only for moments of crisis. You may come because you feel stuck, overwhelmed, disconnected, anxious, or unsure of what you want. You may be navigating grief, relationship patterns, identity questions, career pressure, a major life transition, or simply wanting to understand yourself more deeply.