30
Years in mental health
27
Years of clinical practice
1M+
One million+ readers reached monthly via GoodTherapy.org, as Founder and former CEO
25 years of
providing
IFS therapy
Noah trained in IFS directly with its developer, Richard Schwartz, PhD, beginning in 2002. He went on to assist in IFS trainings, host workshops, and supervise other IFS therapists. In 2007 he founded GoodTherapy.org, one of the world’s leading mental health resources, which he led until 2018.
Some of the things
I help people with...
People come to therapy for many reasons. Some know exactly what hurts, others know that something just doesn't feel right. When something's off it can show up in how you relate to yourself, how you relate to others, how you cope with stress or pain, or in the distance between how you feel and how you'd like to feel.
WHAT I OFFER
Two ways we might work together.
Each begins with a free 15 minute consultation so we can briefly connect and see whether the fit feels right.
Individual IFS Psychotherapy
For adults who want to better understand themselves, work through painful or long standing patterns, and create deeper, more lasting change. My work is strongly informed by Internal Family Systems therapy, which helps us approach the parts of ourselves that struggle, react, protect, defend, or carry hurt and fear with curiosity and compassion, so that old patterns can begin to loosen and new ways of being can emerge.
Couples and Marriage Counseling
For couples who feel distant, conflicted, or caught in patterns they don’t know how to change. Couples therapy can help each person communicate more openly and understand one another more deeply, so that both partners feel heard, cared for, and less alone in the relationship. Along the way, couples begin to recognize the patterns they create together and learn new ways of responding that can bring more understanding, connection, and compassion into difficult moments.
When Relationships Stop Feeling Easy
When relationships stop feeling easy, people often assume the problem is only communication, conflict, or stress. Sometimes those are part of it. But just as often, the deeper issue is that old emotional patterns have started shaping the way we react, protect ourselves, withdraw, pursue, or interpret the people we love. Online therapy can be a meaningful place to begin understanding those patterns without blame or harsh self judgment. Meeting by video or phone allows the work to happen in a setting that is often more private, more comfortable, and easier to maintain over time. From there, therapy can help you notice what gets activated in closeness, what you learned long ago about safety and connection, and what may be keeping your relationships from feeling more open and satisfying now. The goal is not to make you perform better in relationships. It is to help you feel more present, less defended, and more able to connect honestly.
There are times in life when relationships begin to feel more effortful than they used to.
Not always because something dramatic has happened. Not always because there is open conflict, betrayal, or obvious dysfunction. Sometimes the shift is quieter than that. A person notices that closeness feels harder to sustain. Conversations feel more guarded. Resentments build more quickly. The distance between what they feel and what they say grows wider. Even relationships that matter deeply can begin to feel tiring, fragile, or hard to trust.
This is often confusing, especially for people who care deeply about others and want to show up well. They may tell themselves they are just stressed, too sensitive, or going through a difficult season. They may keep hoping that if life settles down, relationships will begin to feel easier again.
Sometimes that happens. But sometimes the difficulty is pointing to something deeper.
Therapy can become meaningful at exactly this point. Not because a relationship has failed, but because the patterns inside it are becoming harder to ignore.
Relationship strain is not always about the other person
When people are hurting relationally, it is natural to focus on what someone else is doing. And sometimes that is important. Some relationships truly are shaped by poor communication, emotional unavailability, inconsistency, or a lack of care.
But often the pain is more layered than that.
A person may begin noticing how quickly they brace for disappointment. How easily they assume misunderstanding. How much effort goes into staying agreeable, staying protected, or staying ahead of possible hurt. They may realize they are often relating from tension rather than openness, from caution rather than trust. Even when another person is loving, some part of them may remain guarded, watchful, or ready to withdraw.
These patterns usually do not come from nowhere. They often reflect older emotional learnings that are still active in current life.
That is part of why therapy can help. It creates room to understand not only what is happening in a relationship, but what is happening inside you while the relationship unfolds. If you want a broader sense of the kind of work I do, how I help people and what I help people with offer a grounded introduction.
Closeness can become complicated for thoughtful people
Many thoughtful adults want honest, connected relationships. They value depth. They care about repair. They want to be known and to know others well.
And yet, for some, closeness can stir up more than love alone.
It can stir up fear of being too much. Fear of being unseen. Fear of disappointing someone or being disappointed. Fear of needing too much, saying too much, or trusting too much. These fears do not always announce themselves clearly. Often they show up indirectly, through withdrawal, defensiveness, people pleasing, overexplaining, irritability, or emotional shutdown.
When that happens, relationships can start feeling hard in ways that do not make full sense on the surface. A person may want intimacy and resist it at the same time. They may long to be understood and still keep large parts of themselves hidden. They may expect closeness to soothe them, but find that it also makes them anxious or self protective.
This is one reason therapy can be such a relief. It offers a place to slow down and make sense of the emotional logic underneath these reactions, without reducing them to personal failure. If you are still discerning what healthy therapy should feel like, how to find the right therapist may be a useful place to begin.
Some relational patterns feel normal until they start costing too much
Many people have lived with the same relational habits for so long that they no longer experience them as patterns. They simply experience them as reality.
They assume they are the one who always has to adapt. Or the one who always pursues. Or the one who should say less, need less, expect less, and stay less affected. They may be highly skilled at keeping peace while quietly losing contact with their own truth. Over time, that can create loneliness even inside relationships that look stable from the outside.
If you are looking for a therapist in Federal Way, WA, therapy can offer a place to notice where connection has become strained, where self protection has taken over, and where your relationships may be asking for a more honest kind of attention.
That does not mean blaming yourself for everything that hurts. It means becoming more aware of the internal patterns that shape how you attach, respond, reveal, and protect. It means understanding which strategies once helped you and which ones are now limiting the kind of connection you actually want.
Because relationship work can feel especially vulnerable, it also matters that therapy feels grounded and trustworthy. If that matters to you, confidentiality in therapy may help answer some of the questions people often have before beginning.
Ease often returns when the inner relationship changes
People sometimes hope that better relationships will arrive once the right person appears, or once current relationships behave differently. Sometimes external change does matter. But often something else also needs attention, the way a person relates to themselves inside connection.
When there is less self abandonment, less fear of truth, less pressure to manage how one is perceived, something important can soften. A person becomes more able to notice what they feel before reacting automatically. More able to stay present without either collapsing or defending. More able to let closeness be real rather than constantly monitored.
That kind of shift rarely happens through force. It usually begins with understanding. Therapy can help make that understanding possible.
Schedule a Free Phone Consultation
If this approach resonates with you, you can learn more about Noah or schedule a complimentary phone consultation. That first conversation can help you get a feel for whether this work seems like the right fit for where you are right now.
About Federal Way, Washington
Federal Way is a large and diverse South King County city in the Seattle Tacoma region, and the city describes itself as one of the more diverse communities in Washington. In a place where many people are balancing work, family, commuting, and the practical demands of daily life, relationship strain can easily get buried beneath responsibility. Therapy can offer a place to step out of pure coping mode and pay closer attention to the emotional life of your relationships.