Self-esteem therapy is therapy that treats your relationship with yourself as the main event - not a side effect of treating something else. It focuses on understanding where your beliefs about your worth came from, why they stuck, and what it actually takes to change them. Not by replacing bad thoughts with good ones, but by going underneath the thoughts entirely and working with what’s really driving them.

In practice, that might look like IFS/parts work to understand the inner critic that never shuts up. It might look like Brainspotting to process beliefs that live in your body, not just your head. It might look like values clarification -figuring out what you actually want versus what you’ve been taught to want. It’s going to look different for everyone, which is why I don’t use a one-size-fits-all approach.

Usually a combination of things (and rarely just on). Low self-esteem is almost always shaped by early experiences: what you were taught about your worth, how the people around you modeled self-worth (or didn’t), whether love in your household felt conditional, whether you experienced trauma, criticism, neglect, or just the steady drip of being made to feel like you weren’t quite enough.

For a lot of my clients, diet culture plays a significant role too. When you’ve spent years being told (by your family, your doctor, the media) that your body is the problem and fixing it will fix your life, that message goes deep. It doesn’t just affect how you feel about your body. It affects how you feel about yourself, period.

Other contributing factors include: chronic anxiety or depression, neurodivergence in a world that wasn’t designed for how your brain works, past relationships that were critical or belittling, and growing up LGBTQIA+ without adequate affirmation or representation.

Low self-esteem doesn’t come from nowhere. It came from somewhere specific. That’s actually good news - because it means it can be addressed.

Yes. And I’m not saying that to sell you something - I’m saying it because I’ve watched it happen with real people who came in genuinely convinced they were just broken.

What changes is not always linear, and it doesn’t happen overnight. But what I see most often is this: people stop treating themselves like the enemy. They start catching the inner critic instead of just believing it. They make a decision because it’s what they want instead of running it through what everyone else might think. They go to the thing. They book the trip. They stop waiting to feel good enough before they start living.

That shift is real, and therapy is one of the most effective ways to get there - especially when you go beneath the surface to address the actual roots of how you feel about yourself.

In a lot of therapy, self-esteem is treated as a symptom - something that “comes last” or will improve once you work on anxiety, or depression, or relationships. And sure, sometimes that’s true. But for a lot of folks, the self-esteem piece is the core issue driving everything else. When that’s the case, treating it as a side note just doesn’t quite cut it.

Self-esteem therapy keeps your relationship with yourself at the center of the work. We’re not just managing symptoms. We’re asking: where did this belief that you’re not enough come from? How does it show up in your daily life? What would it actually look like to change (and not just cope with) it?

That’s a different kind of depth. And it tends to produce more lasting change.

Honestly? It depends (and anyone who gives you a specific number without knowing your situation is probably oversimplifying it).

For some folks, things start shifting noticeably within a few months of consistent weekly sessions. For others, especially when low self-esteem is deeply rooted in trauma or has been reinforced over decades, it’s longer-term work. Most of my clients are in therapy for at least six months to a year, and many continue beyond that - not because they’re “stuck,” but because they’re doing real, substantive work and finding value in it. This work also often needs reinforcement and validation over time.

What I can tell you is that the depth of change tends to match the depth of the work. Quick fixes don’t produce lasting shifts. Slow, honest, sometimes uncomfortable work tends to produce the real thing.

For a lot of people - especially folks who live in larger bodies, folks who’ve grown up steeped in diet culture, or anyone who was ever told their body was the problem -these two things are completely intertwined.

When you’ve been taught that your worth is conditional on how your body looks, every bad body image day is also a bad self-esteem day. You can’t separate them. And trying to “fix” your self-esteem while leaving the body stuff untouched usually doesn’t work because the same root message is driving both.

This is actually one of the places where my practice is a little different from most. I don’t treat body image as a separate specialty from self-esteem. I treat them as what they are: two expressions of the same underlying wound. And I work with both, from an anti-diet, weight-inclusive lens. Your body is not the problem here. It never was.

No. Full stop.

You don’t need a diagnosis. You don’t need to be in crisis. You don’t need to meet some clinical threshold of suffering before you deserve support. If you’re walking around with a low-grade sense that something is wrong (that you’re not quite living your life, that the inner critic is running things, that you feel smaller than you want to be) that’s enough. You qualify.

A lot of my clients have spent years feeling like their struggles “weren’t bad enough” for therapy. That belief is itself a symptom of low self-esteem. You don’t have to earn help.

Yes, and this comes up a lot. If past therapy felt too surface-level, too focused on coping skills and not enough on what’s actually underneath (or if you left feeling like you talked a lot and nothing really changed), I hear that.

The modalities I use, particularly IFS (parts work) and Brainspotting, tend to work at a different depth than traditional talk therapy. They’re designed for exactly the kind of work where thinking and talking about something isn’t moving it. If you’ve felt stuck in previous therapy, those approaches are often where things finally start to shift.

Yup! I offer virtual therapy throughout Florida and Vermont. In-person sessions are available at my office in Carrollwood, North Tampa.

If you’re not sure whether in-person or virtual is a better fit for you, we can talk through it during your free consultation. Both formats work. The sessions are the same depth - I’m the same person on a screen.

Before a first session, we do a free consultation - usually about 15 minutes - to make sure we’re a good fit. No intake paperwork, no pressure, just a real conversation about what’s going on for you and what you’re looking for.

If we decide to move forward, the first few sessions are really about getting to know you. What’s showing up day-to-day, how you got here, what you’ve already tried. I don’t work from a script or protocol. We build the work around you, not the other way around.