I’m a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist who believes in the wisdom of our bodies. We’ve become so accustomed to reacting without intention that we rarely pause to truly listen to what our bodies are telling us. French philosopher René Descartes famously said, “I think, therefore I am.” I’d like to reframe that:

We feel, therefore we are.

Our bodies don’t think first—they feel first. Yet we’ve been conditioned to suppress those emotions, to hide them, to feel ashamed of them. In doing so, we lose our connection to ourselves. If we can’t connect with ourselves, with our own emotional needs, how can we possibly connect with others?

More often than not, the behaviors we’ve adopted to bury our emotional needs become maladaptive. We get defensive. We lash out. We turn away. We cheat. We yell. We insult. We criticize. We shut down. We manipulate. We fight. The list goes on.

But what if we actually listened? What if we recognized the power we hold when we tune in to our emotional experience?

We can’t simply think our way through relational challenges because, at their core, conflicts aren’t just about the surface-level issues—we’re fighting to have an emotional need met. When we don’t recognize that need, we get stuck in patterns of disconnection. As a therapist, I help clients uncover the emotions driving their behaviors so they can move from disconnection to understanding, from reaction to intention.