Abigail McNair

Women who are managing a great deal and are not sure how much of it is theirs.

Most of the women I see are not in crisis. They are the ones other people call first. They hold the family, the job, the logistics, the emotional weather of everyone around them, and they are good at it. What brings them to therapy is usually the slow recognition that they have been overriding themselves for a long time.

They may be moving through a separation, a rupture, a grief, or a change in identity. Or nothing has happened at all, and that is its own kind of disturbance. A woman’s family, culture, money, and obligations are not the background to her distress. They are usually part of it.

Warm, direct, and attentive to what is happening beneath the practiced version of the story.

I ask clear questions, notice contradiction, and make room for complexity without turning every problem into a mindset issue or a communication exercise. I do not assume that insight alone creates change, and I do not rush toward action before the conditions for action are in place.

Humor has a place in this work. So do grief, ambivalence, anger, uncertainty, and the parts of a story that do not resolve.

I have counseled youth in South Africa, volunteered internationally for six years, and parented across different cultures. That work taught me to ask what a person’s conditions actually allow before asking what she should do.

The consultation is an opportunity for us both to consider whether the relationship, structure, and focus of this practice fit the work you are seeking.