What concerns do you help with?

I work with women navigating concerns such as anxiety, emotional overwhelm, people-pleasing, difficulty setting boundaries, grief and loss (including early pregnancy loss), relationship stress, relational trauma, and life transitions.

What is it like to work with you?

My style is warm, trauma-informed, and collaborative. I tailor therapy to your needs and goals, and we move at a pace that feels supportive while still making meaningful progress.

How do I get started?

You can contact me through my website, email, or phone to schedule a free 15-minute consultation. If we decide to move forward, we will schedule your first appointment and I will send you the next steps for paperwork and intake.

Do you offer services in Spanish?

Yes. I provide services in English and Spanish.

Do you accept insurance?

I am a private-pay practice and do not bill insurance directly. If applicable, I can provide a superbill that you may submit to your insurance company for possible out-of-network reimbursement. Working outside of insurance allows your therapy to stay focused on you, not on requirements or limitations set by a third party. This means we are not restricted by diagnoses, session limits, or pre-approved treatment plans, and your personal information remains more private. We can move at your pace, focus on what truly matters, and use approaches that best support your healing, rather than what insurance dictates.

What are your therapy fees?

My current private-pay fees are $150 per session for clients in Ohio and Florida, and $100 per session for clients in Puerto Rico. I also offer a 4-session package with a 25% discount.

How to Tell the Difference Between a Hard Season and a Pattern Worth a Closer Look

Sep 30

Written By Ana Baratta Posada

Most of us can point to a rough week without much trouble. The week the baby didn't sleep. The week work fell apart. The week everyone at home was short-tempered and nobody quite knew why.

What's much harder to see is the moment a hard week quietly becomes a hard pattern. It rarely announces itself. There's no single day when you think, "This is how it is now." Instead, it shows up slowly — in the way you start rehearsing conversations before you have them, in the way you check someone's mood before you walk into the kitchen, in the way "it's just a stressful time" has been the explanation for a year and a half.

This happens most often inside the relationships that matter most to us: with a partner, a parent, an adult child, a sibling, a family system we've been part of our whole lives. Those are exactly the places where we have the most reason to give the benefit of the doubt — and the most to lose if we look too closely.

So let's look, gently.

A hard season has edges. A pattern doesn't.

A hard season is usually tied to something you can name: a move, a diagnosis, a job loss, a new baby, a death in the family. It's painful, sometimes very painful, but it has a shape. You can see where it started, and even if you can't see the end yet, you can imagine one.

A pattern feels different. A few questions that can help you tell them apart:

Is there a clear reason — and does the reason keep changing? In a hard season, the stressor stays fairly consistent. In a pattern, the explanation shifts ("I'm tired," then "work is crazy," then "you're too sensitive"), but the behavior stays the same.
Does it ease when the circumstances ease? When the deadline passes or the crisis settles, does the relationship breathe again? Or does the tension simply find a new reason?
Who is doing the adjusting? In a hard season, people tend to lean on each other in turns. In a pattern, one person is usually doing most of the accommodating — and often that person is you.
How do you feel before the interaction, not just after? Dread, rehearsing, walking on eggshells, or feeling relief when someone isn't home are signs your body has noticed something your mind hasn't named yet.
Would you be worried if a friend described this to you? We are often far more clear-eyed about other people's relationships than our own.

None of these questions is a diagnosis. They're simply a way to slow down and notice.

What patterns often look like (when they don't look like much)

In my work with women — many of them the capable ones, the ones who hold everything together — I see how easily a painful pattern gets translated into something that sounds reasonable. It rarely looks like what we imagine. More often it looks like this:

Control that shows up as concern. "I just want to know where you are because I worry about you." Care is real and good. But when "worry" means you need permission to see friends, have to share your location at all times, or feel guilty spending your own money, it may be less about your safety and more about someone else's need for control.

Criticism that shows up as honesty. "I'm just being honest" or "I'm the only one who'll tell you the truth." Honest feedback leaves room for your perspective and is delivered with warmth. A steady diet of correction — about your body, your parenting, your cooking, your intelligence — slowly teaches you to doubt yourself.

Withdrawal that gets explained away as being tired. Everyone needs space sometimes. But silence that lasts days, affection that disappears as punishment, or a partner who goes cold whenever you bring up a concern can leave you apologizing for things you didn't do, just to make the distance end.

Your own over-functioning that gets called "being a good daughter / wife / mom." This is the one I see most. When you're the person who always smooths things over, always makes the call, always says "it's fine" — you can end up holding the entire pattern in place without realizing it. Not because anything is your fault, but because keeping the peace has become how you stay safe and loved.

If you read that list and felt a small tightness in your chest, pay attention to that. It isn't proof of anything. It's information.

Naming a pattern is not the same as assigning blame

This is often where women stop themselves. If I call this a pattern, then I'm saying he's a bad person. Or my mom is. Or I am.

Naming a pattern doesn't require a verdict. It doesn't mean you have to confront anyone tomorrow, leave a relationship, or decide who is right. It simply means you're willing to pay attention to what keeps happening — and how it's affecting you.

Many relationship patterns are built by more than one person, sometimes over generations. Some come from unhealed trauma, family rules nobody ever said out loud, or the ways we learned to survive as children. Understanding where a pattern comes from can bring a lot of compassion — for others and for yourself. And compassion and clarity can exist at the same time. You can love someone and still notice that something between you isn't okay.

Why October is a good time to ask these questions

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Not every difficult pattern is abuse, and this post isn't meant to put that label on every hard relationship. But many people who later recognized they were in an abusive relationship say the same thing: at first, I thought it was just a hard season.

Abuse is not only physical. It can be emotional, verbal, financial, or show up as isolation and control. And the same skill — noticing when "a rough patch" has become "the way things are" — is useful whether you're navigating a controlling relationship, a family system that keeps pulling you back into old roles, the long shadow of past trauma, or a life transition that has quietly changed how you relate to the people around you.

If you feel unsafe right now, please reach out for support. In the U.S. and Puerto Rico, you can contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline 24/7 at 1-800-799-7233 (English and Spanish), text START to 88788, or chat at thehotline.org. If you are in immediate danger, call 911.

What a closer look can actually look like

Looking closer doesn't have to be dramatic. It can be as simple as:

Writing down what happened, in plain words, when something leaves you unsettled — and rereading it a few weeks later.
Noticing how you feel in your body before, during, and after time with this person.
Asking yourself what you've stopped doing, saying, or wanting in order to keep the peace.
Talking it through with someone outside the situation who has no stake in the outcome.

That last one matters. Patterns are hard to see from the inside, especially when you've been adapting to them for a long time. Sometimes you just need a steady, nonjudgmental space to say it out loud and hear how it sounds.

If you'd like to talk it through

You don't have to have it all figured out before reaching out. You don't need to know whether it's "bad enough," and you don't need to have made any decisions. A first session can simply be a place to describe what's been happening and sort through it together — at your pace, in English or Spanish.

If something in this post felt familiar, I'd be glad to help you take a closer look.

Book your first session here → Contact Us

Dr. Ana Baratta, PhD, LPCC, is a bilingual licensed clinical counselor with more than 27 years of experience helping women in Ohio, Florida, Indiana, and Puerto Rico work through anxiety, people-pleasing, trauma, infertility, and pregnancy loss.