Skip to content 
Depression Therapy in Washington, DC
Depression is heavy in a way that is hard to explain to anyone who has not been inside it. It is not only sadness, it is the flatness, the distance from things that used to matter, the sense that today will cost more than you have.
If you are reading this while exhausted, you do not have to get through the whole page. The short version is that I am a licensed professional counselor with an office in Washington, DC, and depression is one of the things I work with most.
What I think is often going on
Depression is frequently framed as low motivation, but more often, it is a calculation: the brain determining that the expected return isn’t worth the effort spent.
This distinction matters because lack of motivation is so often treated as a personal failure. It isn’t. When your efforts consistently yield no lift or change, your nervous system adapts by shutting down output. It stops spending resources on a game that feels rigged. That is an understandable protective response—even when it leaves you incapable of sending a simple text.
Where I start
I am interested in what you have stopped doing that used to give even small amounts of reinforcement, and what is keeping the loop going.
So early sessions tend to be specific rather than abstract. What has quietly fallen away over the past months. What used to give you something back, even a little of it. What happens in the gap between wanting to do a thing and not doing it. What a slightly better day looked like, and what was different about it.
None of it is a test you can fail. Plenty of people arrive with no answer at all, and that is useful information too.
About action and motivation
There’s a reason behavioral activation holds such strong empirical support: in the math of depression, action almost always has to come before motivation.
I frame it this way carefully. This isn’t advice to force yourself through exhaustion, nor is it a promise that activity alone fixes things. It’s about order of operations. Waiting until you feel ready leaves you at the mercy of a condition whose main symptom is making you feel unready.
So, we find a micro-step that feels truly doable in your current capacity, and we track the feedback. Small isn’t a compromise—it’s the strategy. We’re simply testing to see if the cycle gives a little ground.
When depression arrives after something
Many of the people I see are not depressed out of nowhere. It came after something happened, or there is a genetic factor.
I want to work with clients who are experiencing pain caused by the major life events we all encounter: a death, the end of a relationship, the birth of a child, a career change such as going back to school or retirement, or family of origin trauma. The way our brain and body experience these shifts causes our emotions to feel chaotic, and our nervous system needs to reset. We can work on that reset in therapy.
Much of how I practice ties our somatic experience to the narrative we use to process what has happened. So alongside looking at what you have stopped doing, we look at what your body is still carrying, and at the story you have ended up telling yourself about the change, which is usually harsher than the one you would offer anyone else in your position.
Working together in Washington, DC
My office is at 1555 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 401A, a short walk from Dupont Circle. I am a Licensed Professional Counselor in the District of Columbia (LPC #PRC 14494).
Here is what the work looks like at the beginning: we take an honest look at the loop you’re caught in, moving only at a pace your system can genuinely tolerate.
If you want to reach out
An initial consultation comes with no expectations. You can share as much as you like, ask what you need to know, and see how it feels. Therapy works best when the fit is right—if we aren’t a match, I am more than happy to help point you toward someone who is.
Call 202.599.0522, or come find me at True North Psychotherapy, 1555 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 401A, Washington, DC 20036.
Whenever you are ready.
