Therapy for high achieving women navigating motherhood and everything it changes.

Saname Counseling is for women who spent years building a life around achievement and are now discovering that motherhood can change what they want from it.

Maybe you’re working less, considering staying home, questioning your career, or simply realizing that success doesn’t mean what it used to.

I help women navigate the anxiety, perfectionism, identity shifts, and old patterns that can surface when life asks you to slow down.

You spent years learning how to achieve. Slowing down is a different skill.

Being driven may have served you really well. You learned how to work hard, solve problems, stay independent, and keep moving toward the next goal. Those qualities helped you build a career, a business, a family, or a life you’re genuinely proud of.

Then motherhood changed the rules.

Your time changed. Your priorities changed. Your capacity changed. Maybe even your definition of success changed. The same qualities that helped you achieve can suddenly show up as anxiety, perfectionism, overthinking, guilt, or the feeling that you should always be doing more.

Therapy can help you understand those patterns without asking you to become less ambitious, less capable, or less yourself.

I want to know what's underneath it.

You probably don’t need someone to tell you that you overthink.You may already know you’re a perfectionist. You know you take on too much. You know slowing down is hard. You might even understand where some of it came from. Knowing is important, but knowing doesn’t always change how something feels.

My approach is integrative and grounded in current research. I draw from EMDR, Internal Family Systems, CBT, brain science, and somatic and nervous system approaches to understand what’s happening in your thoughts, emotions, body, relationships, and deeper patterns.

I don’t decide ahead of time which modality you need.

I start with you.

Therapy that makes sense outside the therapy room.

Understand the pattern

We’ll get curious about why you think, feel, and respond the way you do instead of simply labeling the behavior as something you need to fix.

Connect the dots

We’ll look at how your experiences, relationships, beliefs, nervous system, and family patterns may still be influencing what’s happening today.

Go deeper when we need to

When insight isn’t enough, we can use approaches like EMDR, IFS, and somatic work to address experiences and patterns that aren’t changing through logic alone.

Create more choice

The goal isn’t to turn you into a different person. It’s to help you respond with more intention instead of automatically repeating what you’ve always done.

You don't need another thing to be better at.

Motherhood has enough expectations already.

You don’t need therapy to become more productive, more patient, more organized, more present, or somehow better at holding everything together.

You need somewhere you can put all of that down for a minute and get curious about what you actually want.

Because the goal isn’t to get you back to the woman you were before motherhood.

It’s to make room for the woman you’re becoming.

Hi, I’m Johanna.

I’m the therapist behind Saname Counseling.

I’m also a mom, business owner, and lifelong brain nerd who understands personally how motherhood can change your relationship with work, ambition, time, and what you thought you wanted from your life.

My style is warm, direct, curious, and collaborative. I love helping women understand why their brains do what they do and what happens when we stop trying to fix ourselves long enough to actually understand ourselves.

There’s a lot more to my story.

How I Approach Trauma Therapy

I don’t believe good therapy is one-size-fits-all.

My approach is integrative, trauma-informed, and grounded in evidence-based practice, neuroscience, and an understanding of how the brain and nervous system respond to our experiences.

I’ve pursued specialized training in trauma treatment, neuropsychology, and approaches that allow us to work with your thoughts, emotions, body, nervous system, and deeper patterns, not just manage symptoms.

I’m also a bit of a brain nerd. I genuinely love learning about how our brains work, why we develop the patterns we do, and how new research can help us understand ourselves differently. I stay engaged with current research and continuing education so my work continues to evolve alongside the field.

EMDR Therapy

I am EMDR Trained through the EMDR Institute, with intensive clinical training, supervised practice, and case consultation in the full EMDR therapy model.

EMDR helps us process experiences that may still feel unresolved or continue to shape how your brain and body respond today.

[ABOUT MY EMDR TRAINING →]

Internal Family Systems

I am IFS Level 1 Trained through the IFS Institute, completing their intensive experiential and clinical training in the IFS model.

IFS helps us understand the protective parts of you — like the achiever, caretaker, perfectionist, or inner critic — instead of simply trying to make them go away.

[ABOUT MY IFS TRAINING →]

CBT + Brain Science

My work is informed by Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), cognitive science, neuroscience, and my specialization in neuropsychology.

I help you understand how thoughts, beliefs, attention, emotions, and learned patterns interact — and why your brain may continue doing something even when you logically know better.

Because sometimes understanding why your brain does what it does is an important part of changing what happens next.

Somatic + Nervous System

Sometimes your body responds before your logical brain has time to catch up.

I incorporate somatic and nervous-system-informed approaches to help you notice what’s happening in your body, understand your stress responses, and build greater awareness and regulation.

Because we can’t always think our way out of something our nervous system has learned to protect us from.

I start with you.

I don’t decide ahead of time that you need EMDR, IFS, CBT, or any other approach.

Sometimes we’ll challenge a thought. Sometimes we’ll get curious about a protective part. Sometimes we’ll notice what your body is telling us. Sometimes we’ll process an experience that still feels stuck. And sometimes we’ll simply talk.

The modality is a tool. You come first.

Let's figure out what you want next.

You don’t have to know exactly what you want from this next chapter.

That’s part of what we can figure out together.

I’m currently on maternity leave and plan to begin accepting new private pay clients in February 2027.