Carrie Carpenter, LCMHCA

You can understand exactly why you do something and still keep doing it… annoying, right?? Sometimes insight is only the beginning. Therapy can help us get underneath the patterns that keep showing up, understand where they came from, and find new ways of relating to yourself and others. I’m warm, empathetic, intuitive, and direct, and I welcome humor in the room. There’s space for the hard stuff, but sometimes we also need to laugh at the strangeness of being human.

I’m especially drawn to working with people who are navigating the impact of past trauma, exploring their identity, or struggling with their relationship with food and their bodies. Maybe you’re working through things from your past, figuring out who you are and what you want, or struggling with guilt, comparison, or being hard on yourself. Often, these experiences are more connected than we realize. Our relationships, early experiences, and the ways we learned to find safety, control, belonging, or acceptance can shape how we see ourselves and move through the world. Together, we can make sense of how your past has shaped you, work through the things that still feel hard, and figure out what moving forward looks like for you.

I love this work because I never stop being amazed by our capacity to grow and change, even when growth is messy or anything but linear. I genuinely love getting to know people—hearing their backstories, understanding what shaped them, and wondering alongside them about who they are and who they might become next. There's something meaningful about helping people make sense of their stories while discovering that their past doesn't have to define what comes next. Being trusted with someone’s story and getting to witness what they do with the chapters ahead is one of the things I value most about this work.

My approach is collaborative and centered on what you want from therapy, not what I think your life should look like. Together, we’ll get curious about the patterns and parts of you that developed along the way—not to “fix” you, but to understand you more deeply and create more choice in how you want to live. I’ll bring curiosity, compassion, honesty, and the occasional well-timed joke. You just bring yourself—we can figure out the rest together.