The Clinicians
About Therapy With Lora Freeman
When Everyone Who Needed You Needs You Differently
You have spent years being who everyone needed. Most of it, you would do again.
Midlife has a way of bringing questions that were easier to postpone. Relationships change. Children need you differently. Careers shift. Bodies change. Grief accumulates. Old trauma resurfaces.
The roles you spent decades inhabiting stop feeling like enough, and some of them stop fitting at all.
Why That Question Has No Rehearsed Answer
You have an answer ready for almost anything you get asked. What everyone needs. What the schedule allows. What would be easiest for the people in the room.
One question has no rehearsed answer, because for a long time there was no room in the day to ask it.
What do I actually want now?
That question can feel exciting, selfish, terrifying, or all three.
Make Something When the Words Come Too Easily
Years of explaining, smoothing, and managing have made you fluent. You can give an accurate account of your life in three sentences and have it land well, which means the practiced answer arrives long before the truer one gets a turn.
Because not everything lives in words, I work in more than words.
Some of a session goes to what your body is doing, since breath and tension tend to register something before language gets there.
The rest goes to making something: writing, an image, movement, sound. The making is where the work happens, and what surfaces in the material often arrives ahead of anything you could have said.
You Sort Out What Belongs to You
Once there is room, particular things surface. A marriage that ended or is ending. Grief that stacked up faster than anyone could attend to it. An ADHD diagnosis that arrived late and explained years of it. Substance use that used to help and then stopped helping. A faith that gave you a great deal and also did real harm. Old trauma that waited until the house got quiet.
Faith runs in both directions here. Some people come because of what happened to them in a religious setting, and some come with a spiritual life they intend to keep and want more of.
Boundaries come up constantly, usually because drawing one would once have cost more than you could afford. Anxiety and depression run underneath a fair amount of it.
Over time the work sorts things out: what belongs to you, what you are ready to release, and what you want the next part of your life to look like.
About Lora Freeman, LMHC
Hi, I’m Lora.
Lesley University is where I did my master’s, with a specialization in Expressive Arts Therapy, and I practice as a Licensed Mental Health Counselor. I’m also certified in yoga, meditation, mediation, and Gender Equity and Reconciliation facilitation. Mediation and meditation are two separate trainings, and both belong on that list.
I see adults, adolescents, couples, and groups. The work I know best runs through complex trauma, difficult relationships, divorce, grief, ADHD, substance-use recovery, and religious or spiritual abuse. Depending on the person, the work draws on somatic approaches, mindfulness, Internal Family Systems, expressive arts, ACT, DBT, and communication work.
My style is compassionate, creative, and client-centered, and I’m an enthusiastic LGBTQIA+ ally. Outside the office, you’ll usually find me with family, my dog or cats, making music, hiking, reading, or writing.
Ask What You Want Now
Whatever comes next gets built out of everything you already know about yourself, which after all these years is a considerable amount.
Tell me what has changed. We can work out what you want from here.
Use the contact form on this site.
Tell Us Where You’d Like This to Move
You don’t need the whole thing figured out before you write to us.
Some people know exactly which kind of therapy they want. Others know only that something isn’t working anymore, and that’s enough to start with.
Tell us what’s been going on, what you’ve already tried, and what you’d like to feel different. We’ll think it through with you and point you toward the therapist and the approach that fit.
You’ve done plenty of understanding already, and now it’s worth finding out what gets it moving.