Relationship Focused Therapy foR
professional Women of Color
You’re an ambitious, intelligent woman of color determined to break through the glass ceiling and be an influential leader in your field.
You’ve invested thousands of dollars on your education, countless hours honing your skills and perfecting your craft, and you know you have what it takes to make lasting impact through your work.
But…
Problems in your relational life are interfering
with your ability to find fulfillment and achieve your goals.
Breakup
You broke up with your ex over a year ago, but you can’t seem to get over them. Every time you go on a date, you find yourself comparing them to your ex. You still can’t imagine your life without them. You feel empty and incomplete. You blame yourself for things not working out. You’re starting to give in to the belief that you’re not good enough to be in a healthy relationship.
Work Relationships
Dating Issues
You’ve been on countless dates, yet you can’t seem to find a lasting match. Whenever things start to seem like they are going well, the other person is suddenly “not interested in being in a relationship” or ghosts you. You wonder if there is something wrong with you. You feel unloveable. You’re starting to feel hopeless that you are never going to find a significant other.
Family Issues
You are at the end of your rope. Your baby never stops crying, your toddler wreaks havoc on your home, your in-laws try to dictate how to raise your kids, and your partner won’t step up to the plate to help. On top of it all, you constantly feel the weight of your parent’s never-ending disapproval. No matter how hard you try, your efforts never seem good enough. You feel like someone is always disappointed in you.
Significant Other
You’ve been with your partner for many years, but you’ve been growing further apart. For a while, you argued nonstop. At moments you felt like you hated your partner. Now you hardly speak to each other, let alone fight. Your mind has been wandering lately to other people, but you just can’t bring yourself to pull the plug on this relationship. You feel stuck and at a loss of what to do.
Loneliness
You find yourself alone in your apartment every day after work. You spend your weekends working because there’s nothing better to do, but deep down inside you know you stay busy with work to distract you from your feelings. You have a few friends, but they always seem too busy for you. As for dating? You don’t even know where to begin. You’ve been so busy focusing on your career, you don’t know the first thing about it.
I can help you use the pain from this relationship issue to gain insight, self-awareness, and self-acceptance that will in turn help you to improve and strengthen the quality of all of your relationships, and therefore in all parts of your life.
Who am I, and how can I help?
My name is Stephanie Lee, and I am a Licensed Clinical Social worker based in the Bay Area. I am dedicated to supporting and empowering female leaders of color who are striving to move up the ranks in their industries and make their much needed voices heard. As the daughter of a successful female business owner and granddaughter of one of the first credentialed female medical doctors in South Korea, I am no stranger to the struggle that strong-minded women face in a patriarchal society that strives to keep women “in their place.”
All too often, women of color have to cut themselves off from social and emotional aspects of their identities in order to compete and survive in a white man’s world. While this may be helpful initially in their work life, it can have severe consequences on their personal lives. Losing touch with ourselves can make things quickly spiral out of control. When we neglect our social and emotional needs, we become reactionary, unintentionally taking out repressed emotions on others. We begin to lose the ability to understand, empathize with, and relate to others. Not only do we hurt our relationships with others, but we lose touch with the most important relationship of all–our relationship with ourselves.
I utilize insight oriented therapy to help clients get to the root of their problems and understand themselves and their relationships at a deeper level. I center my therapy work with clients around their relationship issues because I believe that fundamentally, the root of all of our emotional struggles–depression, anxiety, stress, loneliness, lack of motivation, self-loathing–stems from broken relationships. Human beings are social creatures who find and form their identities, experience their deepest wounds, discover their strengths and weaknesses, and find healing and fulfillment in the context of relationships. It is through our most difficult relationships that we come to know the deepest parts of ourselves, and it is through knowing ourselves that we learn how to thrive in relationships and therefore in all areas of life.
By providing an understanding, safe, nonjudgmental environment, I can help you explore your innermost thoughts, feelings, joys, struggles, hopes, and fears with openness, acceptance, and curiosity. Through this process, we can work together to get to the bottom of your relationship issues and figure out how to strive toward healthier, more nurturing relationships in the future.