Eve Penberthy

I am a white, cisgendered, queer woman (she/her) who understands the sense of aloneness that can happen inside of loss and life upheaval, and how this can impact our sense of self, our feelings of belonging, and our capacity to engage in our lives. I am passionate about the depth and healing that can grow from these places when there is the right company, and the ways that creativity, humor, and connection can bring us closer to ourselves and our belonging.

I work with clients with strong love, warmth, challenge, creativity, and a commitment to building relationship. I value community, nuance, an understanding of systemic oppression and power, attention to basic needs, and all-access psychoeducation. I center an understanding of how trauma and grief–personal, cultural, systemic–impact the nervous system, basic functioning, relationships, and feelings of aliveness; both in individuals and over generations.

I often work with clients who aren’t sure if they want to be in therapy, or for whom therapy feels like a strange leap. I work with gender diverse clients, young people navigating loss, and people struggling with depression, anxiety, and loneliness. Themes of attachment and relationship, intergenerational trauma, sexuality, creative expression, spirituality, and community building often arise in this work. I draw on my training in somatic psychotherapy to support a body-based understanding of trauma and healing, deeply tied to relationship. Cultivating somatic awareness, using present moment experience, sequencing through movements and emotions, and tracking the physical experience of both therapist and client, is centered in this work. I also hold a firm understanding of our bodies as part of a bigger web of systems and cultures, which we are constantly in conversation with.

Through these tools, we can learn to recognize nervous system states in our own bodies and learn how to work with them with self-understanding, compassion, and support. When we have this foundation, there can be more room for the emotions and physiological experiences of fear, anger, love, joy, and grief to move through our bodies without getting stuck, and while staying in connection to ourselves and our world. Together we can work to build safety in our relationship as a starting point for processing trauma, grief, and stuckness and supporting a deeper sense of choice, aliveness, relationship, and autonomy.

A series of losses in my 20s set me on a lifelong path of knowing love and grief as inseparable. These experiences have been immense teachers, have brought me closer to myself and my capacity, and also continue to shake and reassemble me daily. I am deeply interested in the ways that we must renegotiate a relationship with life in order to keep on living after loss, and the way sacred, gritty creativity can give us a channel through which this renegotiation can happen. 

In my free time, I am a poet, a rookie gardener, and an auntie.