Esther is funny, and she doesn't think that's in tension with the work.
If you've done therapy that was unrelentingly heavy — where you talked about the worst things in your life for fifty minutes and left more tired than you arrived — she's a different experience. You can laugh in her sessions. Not laughing instead of dealing with it, and not her making light of what happened to you. She just doesn't believe pain has to be handled solemnly to be taken seriously.
She's unusually good at making confusing things make sense. Why you keep going back to something that hurts you, why you can see the pattern clearly and still not be able to stop — she'll find the comparison that makes it click. People often leave a session finally understanding something they'd been told a dozen times before.
She taught preschool for seven years before this, and left partly because she kept watching what she built with kids come undone in their homes. That's what pulled her toward family work. She sees individuals, couples, and families now, and she takes hard cases without flinching.
