You’re capable. Thoughtful. Responsible.
You’ve built a life that, from the outside, may look pretty good.
You may have built a successful career or business. People rely on you. You know how to solve problems, meet deadlines, take care of people, and get things done.
But lately—or maybe for much longer than you want to admit—you’re exhausted by how much effort it takes to keep that life going.
Maybe you have ADHD or autism. Maybe you were diagnosed later in life. Maybe you’ve quietly suspected for years that your brain works differently, but you’re not sure you fit the descriptions you’ve seen.
You don’t need to have that figured out before you come here.
I offer online therapy for women in North Carolina who want to understand what they actually need, say it more clearly, and make changes that work in their real lives—not just understand themselves better intellectually.
Maybe this sounds familiar
You wake up already tired.
Your partner is beside you, but you don’t feel particularly connected. Before your feet even hit the floor, some part of you is already tracking what needs to happen today.
Who needs what?
What have you forgotten?
What’s happening at work?
Are you doing enough?
And if you’re this exhausted, are you actually allowed to rest?
Maybe you’re still running a business, managing a career, or doing work that other people think you’re exceptionally good at—but you’re increasingly bewildered by how hard it has become to keep all the pieces moving.
Or maybe retirement or another midlife transition was supposed to bring relief. Instead, losing the external structure you relied on has left you strangely unmoored.
Maybe menopause seems to have changed the rules.
Things you managed for years suddenly feel harder to manage. The bandwidth just isn’t there.
Your spouse says the one wrong thing and you feel a flash of rage that surprises even you.
Your favorite comfort shirt disappears in the laundry and suddenly you can’t cope.
An ordinary work email that you would once have handled without thinking sits unanswered because you can’t figure out where to start.
You shut down. Or melt down.
And afterward you’re left wondering:
Why can’t I handle things anymore?
You stay busy. You take care of the house. You keep things moving at work. You anticipate what your partner, colleagues, employees, or clients need. You smooth things over. You remember things other people don’t remember. You quietly manage more than anyone around you realizes.
At the end of the day, somehow all that activity feels like it added up to nothing.
And still, you have the nagging sense that you should have done more.
Maybe you’ve been in therapy for years. You’re insightful. You know your patterns. You’ve read the books.
You like your therapist, and the work has helped.
And yet some part of you still feels stuck—like you’ve talked about it all, and the words haven’t quite reached the place where it lives.
Then something small happens.
You’re trying to update the family finances—or finish something for work—and the webpage won’t open.
It shouldn’t be a big deal.
But suddenly you’re sobbing. Shaking. Completely overwhelmed.
And now you’re not only upset about the webpage.
You’re upset that you’re upset. And ashamed about getting upset.
What is wrong with me?
Other people seem to have a handle on life. Why have I never been able to?
I must be broken.
Maybe I am the problem.
You are the expert on your own life. We figure it out together.
What if you aren’t failing at life?
You may have spent years believing you just need to try harder.
Be more organized. More disciplined. Less sensitive. More patient. Better at relationships. Better at resting. Better at keeping up.
But what if the problem isn’t that you haven’t tried hard enough?
What if there are good reasons you’re exhausted?
And what if the parts of you that you’ve been trying so hard to fix aren’t evidence that something is wrong with you?
I work from a neuro-affirming perspective. That means I don’t approach ADHD, autism, sensitivity, or other neurological differences as defects that need to be trained out of you.
Therapy can become a place to understand how your particular system works—and begin doing something different with what you discover.
Not just more insight.
Change you can actually feel in your body, your relationships, your work, and the choices you make about your own life.
Maybe you don’t need to try harder. Maybe you need a different way through.
Understanding yourself is important. But sometimes understanding isn’t enough.
Hi, I’m Darcy Jones, LCSW.
I work with midlife women who are neurodivergent, suspect they may be neurodivergent, or have spent much of their lives wondering why ordinary life seems to require so much more effort from them than it appears to require from everyone else.
Many of the people who find me are already highly insightful.
They don’t necessarily need another hour of explaining their patterns.
They want help changing what happens when those patterns get activated.
My work is collaborative, strengths-based, somatic, attachment-informed, and neuro-affirming. We can talk—but we can also pay attention to what happens in your nervous system in real time.
The goal isn’t to override what your body is doing or force yourself to react differently.
And I don’t begin from the assumption that you are broken.
I assume that there is resilience here. Together, we can become curious about what your nervous system has learned, what it is trying to do for you, and what helps you have more choice.
It’s about becoming more able to recognize what you need, stay with yourself when things get uncomfortable, and have more choice about what happens next.
You are the expert on your life. I bring extensive training and experience with trauma and ADHD, as well as my own lived experience as an AuDHD person.
We figure it out together.
If this sounds like the kind of therapy you’ve been looking for, book a free 20-minute consultation.
What would tell you therapy was actually helping?
One of the questions I ask is:
“When this therapy helps you, what will be different? How will you know?”
Your answers might be surprisingly ordinary.
Maybe you carve out an entire day to follow a creative impulse—even though your partner isn’t thrilled about it.
You notice what you want before automatically figuring out what everyone else wants from you.
You make a clear request without rehearsing it for three days.
The person you love has feelings about your request, and instead of immediately soothing, explaining, backing down, or managing their reaction, you let another grown-up have their feelings.
And you go work on your project.
At work, maybe you notice that you’re overloaded before you reach the point where everything feels impossible. You ask for more time, delegate something, close the laptop, or decide that something can actually wait until tomorrow.
Maybe you experiment with routines that give your days more structure—and when you don’t follow the routine perfectly, you adjust instead of deciding you’ve failed.
You allow someone you love—or someone you work with—to struggle a little without immediately stepping in to fix, organize, remind, anticipate, accommodate, or rescue.
You begin to discover that your needs and wants are yours to recognize and voice. Other people don’t always have to like them. They don’t even have to meet all of them.
And if you have another meltdown?
It doesn’t automatically become a three-day shame spiral.
Something inside you can say:
That was hard. And I’m still okay.
Your worth begins to feel less dependent on how useful, productive, accommodating, or perfectly regulated you can be.
Session Details:
Sessions are 55 minutes and take place online via secure video platform.
At this time, I work with adult individuals only — not couples or families.
I am currently licensed to work with people in the state of North Carolina
Session Fee: $200
I am a private pay provider, though I will continue to see people with BCBS through June of 2027.
I can provide a superbill upon request if you wish to seek out-of-network reimbursement.
If you have questions about fit, a free consultation is available.
If you are a referring provider, go to my Services Overview page
If something in you is saying “this might be the kind of support I’ve been needing” I invite you to reach out.
I offer a free 20-minute consultation so we can get a sense of whether we’re a good fit.
This is a chance for you to ask questions, share a bit about what’s bringing you here, and feel into the space we might create together.
You don’t have to figure it all out first. Just begin.
There’s no obligation — just a chance to see if this feels right.
If you’ve already done years of therapy, why might this be different?
Talk therapy can be enormously useful. I use talk therapy too.
But sometimes you can understand a pattern in exhausting detail and still find yourself doing it.
You know you over-function in relationships—and you still jump in.
You know you’re allowed to say no—and your whole body braces or your heart collapses into your feet when someone is disappointed in you.
In that moment, you are sure you are meant to be alone.
You know the webpage isn’t an emergency—and your nervous system reacts as though something terrible has happened.
This is where I tend to work differently.
I use Somatic Experiencing®, attachment work through Dynamic Attachment Repatterning Experience (DARe), mindfulness, strengths-based, solution focused interviewing, and, when useful, cognitive and behavioral approaches.
In ordinary language: we can work from the bottom up, not only from the top down.
Instead of asking your thinking brain to control every response, we get curious about what your body is already doing. We slow things down enough to notice sensations, impulses, emotions, images, patterns of activation, and moments when something begins to shift.
We also look for what is already working.
What helps?
Where do you already have more choice?
What accommodations, relationships, environments, routines, or ways of being make it easier to be yourself?
Then we build from there.
You don’t need to perform therapy correctly. And you don’t need to retell every hard thing that has ever happened to you in order for us to work with how those experiences are showing up now.
You don’t need a diagnosis to take your experience seriously
I know that questions about neurodivergence can be complicated.
Maybe you suspect ADHD, but a doctor told you that you don’t have it.
Maybe you’ve wondered for years whether you’re autistic, but you don’t resemble the autistic people you’ve seen portrayed on television or online.
Maybe you don’t want a formal diagnosis.
Maybe you’re concerned about stigma, discrimination, or how a diagnosis could affect the way other people see you.
Or maybe the word disabled brings up another worry:
What if I’m not really neurodivergent? What if I’m taking up space that doesn’t belong to me?
You don’t need to arrive with a diagnostic label for us to get curious about your experience.
I don’t provide formal ADHD or autism evaluations. What I can offer is a non-pathologizing place to explore what you’ve noticed about yourself, what drains you, what overwhelms you, what helps, what you’ve been doing to get through life, and what might work better now.
I am also queer- and trans-affirming, and I welcome the complexity that can come with exploring neurodivergence alongside identity, relationships, sexuality, gender, work, and major life transitions.
Understanding yourself doesn’t have to become another thing you need to get right.
“Yeah, but…”
Some questions people often have before reaching out. Click any question to read the answer.
I need my therapist to be in person. How can somatic therapy work online?
Somatic therapy isn’t something I “do to” your body.
Even over video, I am paying attention to you—your facial expression, your body language, your breathing, the shifts that happen as we talk. I’m also tracking my own experience as I sit with you.
We are building a real relationship. Yes, it is a therapeutic relationship. And it is still a real relationship between two human beings.
Sometimes I may say something as simple as:
“You are not alone right now.”
And then we can slow down.
What happens when you hear that?
Does some part of you believe me? Does another part want to get away? Does your breathing change? Do you soften? Brace? Feel nothing at all?
That’s something we can notice together.
You are in your own physical space, but you don’t have to do the work there alone.
Sessions are held by secure video for clients in North Carolina.
My life looks good on paper. I’m not struggling enough to need therapy.
You don’t need to wait until your life falls apart before you take your exhaustion seriously. If the amount of effort required to maintain a life that looks “fine” has become unsustainable, that’s something worth getting curious about.
I’ve been in talk therapy forever. Why would this time be different?
It may be that you don’t need more insight alone. If you already know why you do what you do but can’t seem to respond differently when the moment actually arrives, body-based and attachment-focused work gives us another place to begin.
What if I have a hard trauma story? Can you handle it?
Maybe you’ve learned to watch your therapist while you’re telling your story.
You notice their face. You wonder if you’re overwhelming them. You start editing yourself, softening what happened, taking care of the person who’s supposed to be there with you—or deciding there are parts of the story you simply won’t tell.
You may be looking for a therapist who can be engaged with you when the story gets hard.
I have extensive training and experience working with trauma. You don’t need to tell me everything at once, and you don’t need to prove how bad it was. We can pay attention to what happens as you tell me what you want me to know, and we can slow down when we need to.
My job isn’t to sit silently across from you while you manage the story—and me—by yourself.
We are in the work together.
What if I only suspect I’m neurodivergent?
That’s okay. I don’t provide formal evaluations, and you don’t need a formal ADHD or autism diagnosis to explore your patterns, needs, sensory experience, masking, burnout, relationships, or the accommodations that might make your life more workable.
You don’t have to prove that you belong somewhere before you’re allowed to become curious about yourself.
This work may be for you if…
You may be a good fit for this work if you’re stable enough for outpatient therapy and ready for genuine inner exploration.
- You may already have a lot of insight—and be frustrated that insight hasn’t translated into change.
- You may be highly competent in your work or business while privately wondering why maintaining everything has become so hard.
- You may want a therapist who is engaged with you, who can stay present when the story gets hard, and who is willing to interrupt or gently challenge you rather than simply listen and nod.
- You may want to get better at recognizing and stating your needs, setting limits, tolerating other people’s reactions, and allowing the adults around you—at home and at work—to be responsible for themselves.
- And you may be ready to explore what happens when you stop organizing your life around being productive, useful, agreeable, or easy for everyone else.
This work is probably not the right fit if…
You’re looking for a passive therapist, a formal ADHD or autism evaluation, emergency or crisis services, or a higher level of care.
My practice is also not the appropriate setting for some persistent active eating disorders, severe dissociative presentations, or situations where acute instability makes this kind of slower inner exploration unsafe or inaccessible.
Finding the right level and type of support matters more than trying to make yourself fit a particular therapist.
Why begin now?
Maybe you have managed this way for decades.
You can probably keep managing.
That’s part of the problem.
You are very, very good at managing.
You can anticipate. Accommodate. Push through. Figure it out. Keep the household running. Keep the business or career moving. Take care of the person next to you. Answer the email. Meet the deadline. Research another solution. Make another list. Try another system.
And from the outside, it may continue to look like everything is fine.
But what would happen if the next chapter of your life weren’t organized around how much you can manage?
What if retirement, menopause, a changing relationship, a late diagnosis—or simply reaching the point where you can’t keep doing things the old way—could become an opportunity to find out what actually works for you now?
You don’t have to wait until you’re “bad enough.”
And you don’t have to work with me.
But I hope you won’t use your ability to keep functioning—at home or at work—as evidence that you don’t deserve help.
Understanding yourself doesn’t have to become another thing you need to get right.
Your life doesn’t have to look bad before you’re allowed to want it to feel different
You can learn to notice your needs before you’re completely depleted.
You can make a request without taking responsibility for everyone else’s response.
You can let the people you love—and the people you work with—struggle sometimes.
You can build routines and accommodations without needing to execute them perfectly.
You can have a hard day without making it mean something terrible about who you are.
And you can begin building a relationship with yourself in which your value isn’t measured only by what you produce, manage, fix, or provide for someone else.
If you’ve spent years understanding yourself and you’re ready to explore what it might be like to actually do something different, I’d be glad to talk with you.
You don’t need a diagnosis.
You don’t need the perfect explanation.
You are allowed to be fallible and imperfect without treating either one as evidence that you’re broken.
And you don’t need to wait until your life falls apart.
Book a free 20-minute consultation and let’s see whether we’re a good fit.