For the woman who wants to trust herself again after a relationship on someone else’s terms

You were in a relationship with someone who you thought wanted the best for you. They were:

an intimate partner

a close friend of many years

your parent

a therapist you trusted

a mentor or teacher you really thought could help you grow.

But instead of feeling more solid and more like yourself, you felt small.
You doubted yourself.
You were made to think that you were the problem in the relationship.

Maybe the real problem wasn’t you at all.

Some relationship dynamics are confusing by design. You think you’re being cared for and encouraged to grow, but there is control and manipulation operating under the surface.

After years of confusion in a relationship like that, trusting yourself again takes a lot of time and practice.

I’m Alegria. Welcome to my therapy practice.

Photo featuring the top half of Alegria, front-facing. She is a white woman with brunette hair and she is sitting in front of a tan wall, smiling warmly. She is wearing a soft grey vneck sweater and a thin gold necklace.

I specialize in helping women recognize and recover from manipulation, control and abuse of power. Whether it showed up in an intimate relationship, with a close friend, in your family growing up, with a spiritual teacher you devoted years of your life to, or a therapist you went to for healing.

I’ve spent the past eight years studying all the ways power and control show up in our relationships, and how we rebuild ourselves after these experiences. I came to this work through my own recovery from cult indoctrination and narcissistic abuse.

I have worked with survivors of abuse to rebuild their trust in themselves, and with perpetrators of abuse to take responsibility for their behavior so they can change.

I teach other therapists to recognize and work with abuse (and to distinguish abuse from non-abusive conflict).

I also have extensive training in working with couples to strengthen their bond and feel safer and more secure together (please note that I do not work with couples where one partner is abusive towards the other).

If you recognized yourself on this page, I want to give you a virtual hug. I know how hard it is to trust yourself when for years you’ve been told that you are the problem, that what you feel is wrong, that you are not seeing clearly.

Working together, we can address what you struggling with:

I know from working with women who are recovering from confusing, disempowering relationships and from my own life experience that clarity is possible. It takes time and patience, and it takes sitting together to carefully disentangle what actually happened. It takes processing anger and grief and working through shame and fear. It takes putting words to your experience so you can use your voice to stand up to the ones who made you feel small.