Therapy for Professional Women in Chicago, IL
For the woman who built the life she wanted and can't figure out why it feels like it's running her. Online sessions across Illinois and all PSYPACT eligible states.
Success was supposed to feel better than this.
You wake up early each morning so you get your "me" time. Your morning routine would make Gwyneth Paltrow proud (envious? sob?).
You're the master of multitasking. You habit stack like the gospel, Atomic Habits, has taught you. Red light mask on and coffee in hand, you begin the ritual Monday morning game of tetris with three conflicting calendars that you will, of course, make work — because you really are that bitch. Then you let out a sigh that could be heard by everyone on your block.
So this is where the Sunday scaries come from.
From the outside, everyone's sure you've made it. From where you're sitting, it's murkier. You roll your eyes every time an out-of-touch colleague calls you a girl boss, but some days you feel exactly like Andy halfway through The Devil Wears Prada: work-obsessed, approval-hungry, good at the job and half-convinced someone's about to notice you're improvising.
Women in roles like yours are expected to make it look effortless, no matter what it's costing. You know you can't keep going like this, but you don't even have time to work out how you'd pivot. So you keep going, because that's what you've always done.
It feels like the moment the runaway train that is your life slows down, you'll have to face what it cost to get here. But you're noticing more grays, more mornings with bloodshot eyes, more snapping at your husband and kids. In the "dream life" you've built, you're the farthest you've ever been from yourself.
This is life in the bittersweet.
You worked hard, from the top 15% of your college and grad school class through the overtime years of your twenties and thirties, and you built exactly the life you wanted. Now it runs you.
You feel pressure to “just be grateful”, because people would die to have what you've built. Hell, ten years ago, you would have too. But part of you is furious that it took this much to get here, and that the payoff feels flat and impossible to hold up without the mental stamina of ten Serena Williamses.
Somewhere along the way, you learned that moving forward and achieving more is the only way to stay safe. It's a lie. It costs you what you value most: presence in your own life, with the people in it. It keeps your most audacious goals, writing a book or opening your own agency, on hold, because they don't fit the current script.
But the ache of who you really want to be, more creative, more present, more liberated, doesn't quiet down.
What you really want is to live inside your own life, not watch it like someone taking pictures from across the room. So when you look back at the photos from your latest international travels, or the last family holiday with everyone together, you're actually in them. Present, with memories, not just pictures.
Maybe you’re:
Waking up already behind, running on caffeine and adrenaline before you open your laptop
Hitting the goal you chased all year and feeling almost nothing
Snapping at the people you love, then lying awake cataloguing it
Saying yes when everything in you wanted to say no
Fantasizing about a completely different life (the book, the shop, the version of you with room to breathe)
Unable to remember the last time you were fully in a moment instead of managing it
Wondering if this restless, wired, slightly numb feeling is just what your 30’s and 40’s are
The problem isn’t that you’re a go-getter, it’s that you fear what will happen if you slow down.
My Approach
The women I work with look like they have it handled. Inside is a different story.
I work with high-achieving professional women in their 30’s and 40’s who are functioning beautifully on paper (the career, the relationships, every box a grown woman is supposed to tick) and privately wondering why the life they fought for feels so far from the one they're living.
I'm Dr. Carolyn Alter, a clinical psychologist in private practice in Chicago. Living in the bittersweet isn't just what I treat — it's terrain I know from the inside, and helping women find their footing in it is the work I care about most.
In our work together, we'll look at:
The old patterns and beliefs backseat-driving your current life, and where they actually came from
Why slowing down feels so unsafe, and what you're afraid you'll find if you do
The gap between the life you've built and the one you actually want to be living
What presence, creativity, and rest could look like without you having to earn them first
My work is psychodynamic, which is a formal way of saying we go beneath the surface to the pattern underneath, rather than handing you one more optimization hack to add to the pile. (You have enough of those.)
Here's the picture I keep coming back to. Your patterns and beliefs are old software, written on the colorful iMac you had in middle school. Your life now is a state-of-the-art MacBook Pro with the M5 chip. You weren't the one who set the system up (that was your parents, or whoever raised you), but you're the one living with the crossed wires now. The work is updating the software (your patterns, your thinking, your coping tools) to match the life, and the person, you've actually become.
Curious what working together would actually look like? More about me here
Ultimately,
This isn’t about doing less, it's about no longer needing to earn your way into your own life.
What you can expect from me: a lot of honesty, the occasional swear, real warmth, and zero interest in you performing "fine" for one more person.
What’s possible for you:
Achieving because you want to, not because stopping feels dangerous
Being fully in the moment (the trip, the dinner, the ordinary Tuesday) instead of managing it from behind the camera
Setting boundaries without the guilt hangover
Feeling your feelings instead of outrunning them
Reconnecting with the parts of you that got filed away as impractical
Trusting yourself again, maybe for the first time in years
A life that feels like yours from the inside, not just impressive from the outside
You've been watching your life from a distance for a long time. There's a way back in.
A Gut Check is a free 30-minute call. You tell me what's keeping you stuck, and I'll give you my honest read on what I'm seeing. If it's a fit, we'll set up your first three sessions and take some time to get to know each other.
Your Questions, Answered
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If slowing down were the fix, you'd have done it already. You're excellent at solving problems. The reason this one hasn't budged is that it isn't a scheduling problem, it's a patterns problem, and those are hard to see from inside your own life. That's the part I help with.
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No. Some of the women I work with are the most capable people in every room they walk into. You don't have to be falling apart to deserve support, and "I'm handling it" and "I'm okay" are not the same sentence.
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A free 30-minute call to see if we're a fit. You tell me what's going on, I give you my honest read on what I'm seeing, and there's no pressure to book anything. If it feels right, we'll set up your first three sessions from there.
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Sessions are $325 for 50 minutes. Many of the women I work with find they want a little more room, especially early on when we're still getting to know each other, or during stretches when things feel particularly heavy. If that's you, we can go to 75 or 90 minutes, prorated at the same rate. We'll figure out together what actually fits.
I'm a private-pay practice, which means I don't take insurance. The upside is that our work is guided by what's actually useful to you, not by what a claims department will authorize or how many sessions a plan decides you're allowed. If you'd like to seek out-of-network reimbursement, I can provide a superbill for you to submit to your insurer (this does involve a formal diagnosis, and I'm glad to walk you through what that means for you).
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Yes. I'm a licensed clinical psychologist based in Chicago, and my practice is fully virtual across Illinois and all 40+ PSYPACT-participating states.
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Of course. The pressure and the perfectionism are rarely the whole story. We'll follow it wherever it actually lives (relationships, grief, family, the identities you've outgrown) because it's all connected, and all of it has a place here.
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I work psychodynamically, which means we look beneath the symptoms to the patterns and beliefs driving them. I also do dream work. As someone who's always struggled through small talk, going deep is my zen place. If you've only ever done the practical, homework-and-worksheets kind of therapy, this is a different, deeper animal.
