Women deserve better therapy.

I’m so glad you’re here; it means that you believe in your own capacity for happiness, ease, and well-being. Therapy is creative work that takes courage and commitment—and, believe me, it’s worth it. The reward is developing a renewed sense of trust in your emotional intelligence and an unshakeable confidence in your personal authority..

Your distress is not a disorder.

Unfortunately, traditional therapy fails to acknowledge the social context women live in. We are often diagnosed with anxiety, depression, postpartum depression, or sexual dysfunction without ever having explored how our well-being is affected by the demands and limitations placed on us by our culture, our workplaces, and even our families. The harm that this does to women is real and measurable.

I’m here not simply to listen, but to actively help you re-interpret your experience and create the life you deserve.

I’m Sheryl Lilke, a professional counselor in Madison, Wisconsin. I believe women’s stories. I honor women’s diverse ways of knowing. I trust women to make their own choices. I encourage women to create new personal narratives in their own voices.

When you and I work together, we’ll draw from a variety of creative approaches including:

• Psychotherapy Created for Women’s Specific Needs: What changes when we examine our lives in the context of the expectations and limitations that social and relational power structures—such as male supremacy and household labor inequity—place upon us?

• Couples Counseling / Marriage Therapy for One: Sometimes when a relationship is in trouble, one partner is unwilling to participate or therapy fails to fix the problem. Individual counseling help you feel empowered to make decisions in your own best interest, free from the traditional gender roles that couples therapy often reinforces..

• Narrative Therapy / Power - Threat - Meaning Framework: When women center ourselves in our own life stories, it enables us to identify the harmful and limiting narratives that have been imposed onnus so that we can re-create them in a way that connects us to our personal authority.

• Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing: EMDR is a method of working with trauma that has been shown to reduce distressing emotions related to memories of traumatic life events.

Women deserve therapy that challenges cultural assumptions about our rights, our wisdom, and our well-being. Let’s create it together.