October 13, 2025

Adjustment disorder Life disruption Life transition loss Psychotherapy

Therapy Adoptee Healers Life transition Multicultural

The Myth of the Perfect Homecoming

Many of us hold a quiet hope that one day, we’ll finally arrive, that we’ll find a place, a relationship, or a version of ourselves that feels completely like home.

But for people who have lived between worlds, that sense of home can feel just out of reach.

You might recognize yourself in that experience if:

– You grew up moving between cultures or countries.

– You’re an adoptee searching for a sense of origin or identity.

– You’re a helping professional who spends your days caring for others but feels emotionally unmoored yourself.

– You’ve gone through big transitions (divorce, relocation, loss) that left you unsure where you belong.

At Horizon Online Therapy, we often work with clients who describe this feeling: “I should feel at home by now, but I don’t.” Therapy can be a space to explore that and to build a new kind of home from the inside out.

Why homecoming can feel complicated

For people living between worlds, belonging isn’t always straightforward.

– You may love your family and still feel unseen by them.

– You may return to a familiar place and feel like a visitor.

– You may have created a stable life and still feel like part of you is missing.

That’s because “home” isn’t only about where we live, it’s about where our nervous system feels safe.

When you’ve experienced trauma, chronic stress, adoption, or cultural dislocation, your body learns to stay on alert. You might be physically home but emotionally scanning for danger. Over time, that vigilance becomes exhausting.

Therapy can help you recognize and unlearn that pattern, allowing the body and mind to rest.

How Therapy Helps You Feel at Home in Yourself

How therapy supports a sense of belonging

Belonging begins with safety. Not in the abstract: in the body.

Through trauma-informed approaches such as EMDR, mindfulness, and somatic regulation, our therapists help clients gently reconnect with that sense of inner steadiness.

You might begin to notice moments like:

– Taking a full breath for the first time in a long while.

– Feeling grounded in your body instead of detached or tense.

– Recognizing that your emotions make sense in the context of your story.

– Understanding that you can be part of multiple worlds — and still be whole.

These are small but powerful markers of homecoming.

The paradox of belonging

People who live between worlds often become experts at empathy.

You might sense what others need, adapt easily, or mediate conflict effortlessly.

These are strengths, but they can also lead to losing track of your own needs.

In therapy, we explore how to stay connected to others without abandoning yourself.

Belonging doesn’t have to mean choosing one identity over another; it can mean holding multiple truths at once.

At home within yourself

Rebuilding home from the inside out

At Horizon Online Therapy, our clinicians work with clients across Oregon who are ready to stop chasing the “perfect” homecoming and start creating safety within themselves.

We use approaches like:

– EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) to heal past experiences that still feel unfinished.

– Narrative Therapy to make sense of who you are and challenge old beliefs about worth and belonging.

– Mindfulness and somatic tools to calm the nervous system and reconnect with the body.

You don’t have to do it alone and you don’t have to find a single “place” to belong.

Homecoming can be a gradual process of learning that you are already allowed to arrive.

Therapy across Oregon — wherever you are

Because our work is entirely online, you can access therapy anywhere in Oregon, from Portland to Eugene, Salem to rural communities that often lack access to in-person care.

If you’ve been longing to feel more grounded, understood, or at peace with your own story, we can help.

Our therapists specialize in trauma, identity, adoption, multicultural stress, and belonging.

Begin your homecoming today

You don’t need to have it all figured out before reaching out.

Sometimes, the first step toward belonging is simply being heard.

Schedule a free consultation to learn how therapy at Horizon can help you come home to yourself. One breath, one story, one moment at a time.

October 11, 2025

Alex

Adjustment disorder Life disruption Life transition loss Psychotherapy

Therapy Adoptee Healers Life transition Multicultural

Therapy for Identity and Belonging

Finding Yourself When You’ve Always Lived Between Worlds

Many people grow up feeling that they don’t fully belong anywhere, caught between cultures, languages, families, or life experiences. You might wonder: Who am I, really, when every place I’ve been has shaped me in a different way?

At Horizon Online Therapy, we specialize in helping people explore questions of identity, belonging, and self-understanding, especially when those experiences are layered by adoption, migration, mixed heritage, or complex family stories.

We believe that belonging is not something you earn; it’s something you cultivate by understanding and honoring your own story.

When Identity Feels Complicated

You might be seeking therapy because you:

– Feel disconnected or “between worlds”, culturally, racially, or linguistically.

– Have a history of adoption and are exploring your story, roots, or attachment experiences.

– Struggle to balance different cultural or family expectations.

– Feel invisible, misunderstood, or like you have to “code-switch” to fit in.

– Notice feelings of shame or loss when it comes to your background or sense of self.

– Want to feel grounded in who you are, even when others don’t understand your experience.

Therapy can offer a space to make sense of these experiences and find language for the parts of you that have never had words.

How Therapy Helps You Reconnect with Yourself

Our approach integrates evidence-based modalities with a deep respect for lived experience and cultural context.

Depending on your goals, sessions may include:

– Narrative and trauma-informed therapy to help you explore your story and make sense of your past.

– EMDR therapy to process memories that still carry emotional charge or feelings of disconnection.

– Mindfulness and somatic approaches to help your body feel safer in belonging.

– Attachment-based work to explore patterns of closeness, trust, and safety in relationships.

– Culturally responsive therapy that honors your background, values, and multiple identities.

Through this work, many clients begin to feel less fragmented, more self-accepting, and able to carry their complexity with confidence rather than confusion.

Our Clinicians’ Experience

Each therapist at Horizon Online Therapy brings a different lens to identity and belonging work:

– Alex De Araujo Sanchez, LCSW — specializes in adoptees, multicultural and multiracial individuals, and those navigating identity reconstruction after trauma or migration.

– Tenaya Meaux, LCSW — supports LGBTQ2A+ individuals, perfectionists, and those exploring identity through self-acceptance and nervous-system healing.

– Rachel Boll, LPC — integrates EMDR, mindfulness, and somatic therapy for clients exploring life transitions, self-worth, and belonging.

We provide therapy for adults across Oregon, fully online, in a space designed to feel safe, grounded, and culturally aware.

What You Can Expect

In therapy, we’ll slow down and explore:

– How your background, experiences, and relationships have shaped your identity.

– Where belonging has felt possible — and where it hasn’t.

– How to develop compassion for the different parts of yourself.

– How to connect with your roots, values, and the communities that feel most aligned.

Therapy becomes not only about healing what hurt, but about reclaiming the right to belong to yourself.

Getting Started

You don’t have to have all the answers. You only need curiosity about your story and a desire for connection.

Reach out today to schedule a free consultation and learn how therapy can help you find your place between worlds.

Between Care and Collapse

Medical providers, healers, caregivers know too well the cost of caring.

The long shifts, the endless charting, the quiet pressure to hold everyone else’s pain without faltering. For many, the white coat becomes both a shield and a weight, a reminder of the promise to heal others, even when their own well-being has been quietly unraveling.

The Medscape Physician Suicide Reports regularly brought this into painful clarity. Physicians in family medicine, obstetrics-gynecology, and psychiatry reported some of the highest rates of suicidal thoughts across all specialties. The numbers are alarming , but not surprising. They echo what many in medicine already know but rarely say aloud: to practice medicine often means to live between worlds: between resilience and collapse, empathy and depletion, duty and despair.

The slow unraveling of burnout

Burnout doesn’t announce itself in a single moment.

It builds gradually, disguised as competence. Staying late, finishing one more note, answering one more message before sleep.

The system rewards endurance, not presence. But over time, endurance becomes emptiness.

Many of my clients describe it as a kind of fading, a dulling of color and connection.

What began as vocation turns into survival.

And the body, always faithful, begins to signal what the mind tries to ignore: you can’t keep carrying this alone.

Therapy for medical providers

When healers forget they’re human

To be a healer is to live inside a paradox: you’re trained to recognize suffering in others but conditioned to minimize your own.

Even asking for help can feel like failure. An unwelcome reminder that providers are not immune to the same fragility they tend.

But you are human before you are a healer.

And the parts of you that ache, that tire, that need rest, those are not weaknesses to overcome; they are thresholds calling you back to balance.

The quiet rebellion of self-preservation

Caring for yourself is not indulgence. It’s quiet resistance against a system that teaches self-erasure as professionalism.

Healing for physicians often begins with permission — to pause, to grieve, to not know, to reconnect with the parts of yourself that exist outside of patient charts and on-call schedules.

It can look like:

– Remembering your body, not just your role.

– Allowing space for hobbies, silence, and genuine rest.

– Reclaiming community. Not only among colleagues. Mostly in spaces where you can speak freely about what medicine takes and gives.

– Reaching out for therapy or peer support, not as crisis management but as maintenance of humanity.

Between two worlds

Caregivers live between worlds: between care and exhaustion, science and soul, precision and vulnerability.

They inhabit the tension between being the helper and being in need of help.

This space, though painful, can also be fertile. It’s where empathy deepens, where humility grows, and where many discover the kind of healing that transcends clinical language.

To heal others well, you must also learn to belong again to yourself.

A note to those who care for others

If you find yourself living in this in-between, the healer who feels empty, the caretaker who has no time to care, know that there is another way to practice wholeness.

At Horizon Online Therapy, we work with physicians, nurses, therapists, and healing professionals who are ready to rediscover the human beneath the role.

Schedule a free consultation to learn how therapy at Horizon can help you come home to yourself — one breath, one story, one moment at a time.

April 2, 2025

horizonadmin

death difficulties loss mourning

Grief Therapy

Between Love and Letting Go: The Quiet Work of Grieving

People often ask me, “How do you find the strength to do grief therapy? It must be so heavy, hearing about death all the time.”

What they don’t see is that grief work, when done gently and honestly, isn’t only about death. It’s about life — the life that remains, and the courage it takes to keep choosing it.

Not all of my grieving clients have lost someone to death. Some have lost relationships, roles, health, or a sense of identity. But those who have lost a loved one, a child, a parent, a partner, a friend, even a beloved pet, share one truth: grief can feel like being suspended between worlds. The world before, and the one after.

The world after loss

Grief doesn’t arrive all at once. It seeps in quietly, filling the spaces between what was and what remains.

For a long time, many people feel trapped, unable to imagine that joy could coexist with loss.

I often hear, “If I allow myself to be happy again, it means I’ve stopped loving them.”

That belief, that love demands suffering, can hold someone in pain long after the moment of loss has passed.

But love doesn’t need our suffering to stay alive. It needs our presence.

The paradox of love

I sometimes invite my grieving clients to imagine reversing the roles.

“If your loved one were here, and you were gone,” I ask, “what would you want for them?”

Would you tell them, ‘Be depressed if you love me’?

Or would you whisper, ‘Live fully. Laugh loudly. Love again.’

Almost every person answers without hesitation: I would want them to be happy.

And in that moment, something inside them softens, as if permission has finally been given to live again.

The transformation of grief

Grief is not something we get over; it’s something we integrate.

When we allow it to move through us, it becomes a source of vitality rather than paralysis.

I’ve seen clients who once felt broken begin to draw from their loss a strength they didn’t know they possessed.

Their love doesn’t fade, it expands. It begins to express itself in how they live, how they give, how they notice beauty again.

Ten years later, they might say,

“What gives me strength today is knowing that every step I take honors the one I lost. Each time I do something for myself, I do it for both of us.”

This is the quiet miracle of grief: that it transforms absence into presence, pain into purpose, and memory into motion.

Living between worlds

To grieve is to live between two worlds: the one that ended and the one still unfolding.

You learn to hold conversations with silence, to love what is invisible, to find belonging even in the spaces that ache.

Grief doesn’t disappear; it evolves. It becomes the bridge between who we were and who we are becoming.

f you’re moving through grief — whether fresh or years old — you don’t have to do it alone.

At Horizon Online Therapy, we help people honor what they’ve lost while gently finding their way back to life.

Therapy can help you live between what was and what’s becoming, with gentleness and truth. Schedule a free consultation.

April 5, 2020

horizonadmin

difficulties

Therapy Uncategorized

How Trauma Impacts Relationships

Trauma doesn’t only live in our memories. It lives in the way we connect.

Even long after a painful event has passed, trauma impacts relationships. Its echo can shape how we trust, communicate, and love. At Horizon Online Therapy, many of our clients don’t come to therapy saying, “I want to heal trauma.” They come saying, “I keep shutting down,” or “I don’t know why I get so anxious when someone gets close.”

Understanding how trauma impacts relationships can be the first step toward creating safer, more fulfilling connections.

The Nervous System’s Role in Connection

When we’ve experienced trauma, whether from childhood experiences, loss, abuse, neglect, or ongoing stress, our nervous system learns to protect us.

It becomes finely tuned to danger, scanning constantly for cues of threat.

In relationships, this can look like:

– Feeling anxious or on edge when someone withdraws or disagrees.

– Avoiding closeness because it feels overwhelming.

– Struggling to believe someone truly cares, even when they show it.

Our body doesn’t distinguish between emotional risk and physical danger — both activate the same protective systems. Therapy can help you learn what safety feels like again.

Common Patterns in Trauma-Influenced Relationships

Trauma can show up in many ways, depending on what we’ve lived through. Some patterns include:

– Avoidance and withdrawal: Keeping distance to stay safe, even from those we love.

– Hypervigilance: Interpreting neutral actions (a tone, a pause, a delay in reply) as signs of rejection.

– Caretaking or people-pleasing: Over-adapting to others’ needs to prevent conflict or abandonment.

– Emotional shutdown: Disconnecting during moments of stress or closeness.

Trauma symptoms can gradually erode relationship closeness and trust over time, especially when one partner experiences persistent reactivity or emotional withdrawal. A 2023 study on trauma and romantic relationships found strong links between early trauma and adult difficulties with closeness, communication, and attachment security.

These aren’t personality flaws. They’re protective strategies your nervous system developed to keep you safe.

How Healing Begins

Healing trauma isn’t about “fixing” yourself. It’s about helping your body and mind learn that the present is not the past.

Therapy provides a safe, regulated space to practice new ways of relating. Over time, that might mean:

– Learning to recognize when your body goes into defense mode.

– Developing tools to calm and ground yourself during conflict.

– Allowing connection and care to feel safe again.

– Building relationships rooted in choice, not survival.

At Horizon Online Therapy, our therapists use evidence-based, trauma-informed approaches such as EMDR, somatic therapy, DBT, and mindfulness to help you process old wounds and strengthen your capacity for connection.

Relationships Can Heal, Too

The good news is that relationships, when safe and consistent, can also heal trauma.

When you’re met with understanding instead of judgment, when someone stays even when you expect them to leave, your nervous system learns something new:

“It’s safe to be here.”

With time, you begin to respond instead of react, to communicate instead of protect, to trust instead of brace.

Finding Support

If trauma has made it hard to feel safe in your relationships, you’re not alone — and healing is possible.

Working with a trauma-informed therapist can help you understand your patterns, find regulation, and experience closeness without fear.

Schedule a free consultation to learn how therapy at Horizon can help you reconnect with others and with yourself. One breath, one story, one moment at a time.

0 The Myth of the Perfect Homecoming