therapy for boundaries & Self-trust in Md, VA & D.C.
You've spent years saying yes
to everyone else. It’s time to come home to yourself.
You're the one who holds it together. The reliable one, the capable one, the person everyone calls, and you're good at it. The problem is that somewhere between taking care of everyone else and keeping the peace, you've stopped being able to hear yourself. You know you need something different. You just can't seem to get there without guilt eating you alive first.
The gap between knowing what you need, and actually letting yourself have it, is exactly where I work. I'm Erin Reddinger, a trauma-informed therapist who helps high-achieving women stop managing their relationships from the outside and start showing up honestly from the inside.
I already know a few things about you.
You haven't said any of this out loud. But I'd be willing to bet that you've said yes to something recently that you absolutely did not want to do — and then spent the next several hours quietly furious about it. Not at the person who asked. At yourself, for not being able to just say no.
That there's someone in your life whose emotional state you track almost automatically. Before you've even said hello, you've already read the room, adjusted your approach, and decided what version of yourself to bring in. You've been doing it so long it feels like intuition. It's not. It's hypervigilance, and it's exhausting.
That you've had the boundary conversation in your head a hundred times. You know exactly what you want to say, exactly how you'd say it, exactly how it would go. And then the moment arrives and something takes over: a kind of dread that has nothing to do with logic, and you hear yourself doing the thing you promised you wouldn't do again.
Maybe someone has told you you're "too sensitive" or "too much," and part of you has filed that away as evidence. Or maybe no one has said it directly, but you've felt the unspoken expectation to make yourself smaller, easier, less demanding. And you've complied for so long that you're not entirely sure what you actually want anymore.
You're not here because you don't understand yourself. You're here because understanding hasn't been enough to change it. If that landed, you're in the right place.
How It Actually Shows Up
01 You say yes, then spiral — You agree to something you didn't want to do, and before the conversation is even over, the resentment has already started. You spend the next three hours talking yourself out of it, or talking yourself into believing you're fine with it.
02 You manage everyone's experience but your own — You track moods, anticipate needs, smooth things over before anyone even notices the friction. You're good at it. But you've been doing it so long that you have no idea what you actually want, because you stopped asking yourself.
03 The guilt arrives before you've even done anything — You think about saying no, and the guilt is already there. Not after the fact. Before. It's not a response to doing something wrong. It's a warning system trained to fire the moment you consider prioritizing yourself.
04 You trust other people's perceptions of you more than your own — When someone tells you you're overreacting, part of you believes them. Even when something inside knows that's not right. You've second-guessed your feelings so many times that your own read on situations has started to feel unreliable.
05 You've started to wonder who you actually are outside of your roles — Take away the titles: the helper, the responsible one, the one who shows up, and you're not entirely sure what's underneath. The question isn't comfortable to sit with. But it's the right one.
Your nervous system learned this. It can learn something different.
People-pleasing, over-functioning, and the inability to hold a boundary aren't personality defects. They're strategies — usually learned early, usually for good reason. In families or relationships where expressing needs was unsafe, where love felt conditional, or where keeping the peace was the only way to stay connected, you learned to put yourself last. It worked. For a long time, it probably kept things stable.
The problem is that your nervous system doesn't automatically update when your circumstances do. The guilt that fires when you try to hold a limit, the dread when you imagine disappointing someone, the inability to trust your own perception when someone pushes back — these aren't you being weak or irrational. They're old wiring doing exactly what it was designed to do.
What makes my approach different is that we don't just coach you on communication scripts or teach you to repeat phrases in the mirror. We go to where this actually lives (in your nervous system, in your history, in the relational patterns that formed before you had language for any of it) and we do the work that makes change possible at that level. Not just knowing better. Actually being able to do it differently.
Signs that this work is for you.
For high-achieving women, boundaries issues rarely look like obvious pushover behavior. If any of these feel familiar, this work was built for you:
Chronic over-responsibility — You feel personally accountable for other people's feelings, outcomes, and comfort — even when logically you know that's not yours to carry.
The guilt that arrives before you've done anything — You don't need to actually disappoint someone for the guilt to show up. Just the thought of prioritizing yourself is enough to trigger it.
Resentment that surprises you — You agreed to something. You were even convincing about it. And now, three days later, you're furious at them, at yourself, at all of it. You don't know how to stop the cycle.
Difficulty trusting your own perception — When someone tells you you're reading the situation wrong, part of you believes them — even when your gut says otherwise. Your own read on things has started to feel like the least reliable source in the room.
An identity that lives in your roles — Take away what you do for everyone else, and you're not sure what's left. The question of who you are when no one needs anything from you is one you've been avoiding.
The inability to hold limits under pressure — You can set a boundary in theory. But the moment someone expresses disappointment, pushes back, or goes quiet — something takes over and you fold. Every time.
How working with me is different.
Most boundaries coaching focuses on communication — the right words, the right tone, the right script. Those things matter. But if you've already tried that and you're still here, it's probably because scripts aren't the problem. The part of you that knows what to say is fine. The part that freezes when someone pushes back is a different conversation entirely.
My work goes deeper. I'm interested in why your nervous system learned to respond this way, what it's been protecting you from, and what it will actually take for it to respond differently. Not in the calm of a therapy session, but in the actual moment when someone is looking at you and waiting for your answer.
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01 I help you understand where the pattern actually came from.
Difficulty holding limits rarely starts with the current relationship. In our work together, I help you trace the pattern back — the family dynamics, the early relational messages, the experiences where having needs felt dangerous or selfish or too much. Understanding where your nervous system learned its current response is the first step toward changing it. My clients often describe this as the first time their people-pleasing has actually made sense to them — as something that was once adaptive, not something that's just wrong with them.
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02 I give you regulation tools that work when the stakes are real.
Drawing from DBT, I'll build with you a concrete set of skills for tolerating the discomfort that comes with holding a boundary — the guilt, the dread, the fear of someone's disappointment. The goal isn't to stop feeling those things. It's to feel them and still be able to choose. My clients describe this as finally having a lever to pull when the moment actually comes.
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03 I help your body catch up to what your mind already knows.
For many of my clients, the hardest part isn't understanding why they can't hold a boundary — it's that understanding hasn't changed anything. When the pattern has deep roots — early experiences of emotional unsafety, relationships where having needs cost you something — I use EMDR to process what's still active in your nervous system. This is where the shift from knowing to being actually happens. Not because you've convinced yourself of something new, but because your system has processed what it's been holding.
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04 I help you rebuild your relationship with your own inner voice.
Most of my clients arrive having spent years doubting their own perception — having been told they're too sensitive, too much, or too demanding often enough that they've started to wonder if it's true. Part of our work together is restoring trust in your own read on things. Learning to distinguish guilt from genuine wrongdoing. Hearing your own voice clearly enough that when someone pushes back, you can stay in contact with what you actually know — and what you actually need.
My Approach: What Changes, and How
What makes my approach different isn't any single tool — it's how I use them together, in response to what you specifically need. I don't run the same protocol with every client. I track what's shifting, what isn't, and why — and I adapt accordingly.
The guilt finally stops running your decisions. (DBT)
Using Dialectical Behavior Therapy, I build with you practical skills for tolerating the discomfort that comes with every real boundary — the guilt, the fear of disconnection, the anticipatory dread before you've even said anything. The goal isn't to stop feeling those things. It's to feel them and still be able to choose. My clients describe this as finally having something real to reach for in the moment — not a script, not a reminder to breathe, but an actual capacity to sit with discomfort long enough to make a different choice.
The old wiring finally starts to change. (EMDR)
When the inability to hold limits has roots in past experiences — early relationships where your needs were a problem, moments where taking up space cost you something, dynamics that taught you love was conditional on compliance — I use EMDR to process what's still active in your nervous system. This isn't reliving the past. It's helping your system finally file it as over, so it stops showing up in your present the moment someone looks at you with disappointment.
The story you tell yourself about your needs changes. (CBT)
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy helps us identify the beliefs driving the pattern — that your needs are a burden, that asking for things is selfish, that other people's comfort is more important than your own experience. We work to replace those beliefs with something more accurate and more compassionate. Because the narrative you carry about what you deserve shapes what you can actually allow yourself to have.
You understand where your patterns came from — and how to change them. (Family Systems)
The role you learned to play in your family of origin — the peacekeeper, the caretaker, the one who made sure everyone else was okay — doesn't stay in your childhood home. It follows you into every relationship and every room. Family systems work helps you see those patterns clearly, understand what they were protecting you from, and start showing up differently in your current relationships without feeling like you're betraying everyone in the process.
Questions people ask before reaching out
If you've been wondering about any of these, you're not alone.
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Because guilt and wrongdoing aren't actually the same thing — they just feel identical. Guilt is often a conditioned response, not a moral signal. If you grew up in an environment where your needs created tension, or where keeping others comfortable was how you stayed connected, your system learned to flag any act of self-prioritization as a threat. That's not your conscience talking. That's old wiring. Part of our work together is learning to tell the difference.
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Because "just say no" skips the part where your nervous system is convinced that saying no will cost you something. Connection. Approval. Safety. The knowing is easy. The doing requires your body to believe that the cost you've been dreading isn't actually going to happen — and that takes more than willpower. It takes practice, and usually, some understanding of where that fear came from in the first place.
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Selfishness is taking without regard for others. A boundary is knowing what you can and can't offer — and being honest about it. One is about disregarding other people. The other is about not disappearing from yourself. They feel identical when you've been taught that your needs are a burden. They're not the same thing.
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Because the boundary was cognitive and the pushback is physiological. You decided, with your thinking brain, what you wanted to hold. And then someone expressed disappointment, or went quiet, or pushed — and your nervous system responded as if something was genuinely at risk. The goal of our work isn't to help you white-knuckle your way through that moment. It's to build enough internal stability that the moment doesn't feel like a threat in the first place.
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Yes — particularly when the pattern has deep roots. EMDR is most useful when we've identified the experiences that originally taught your nervous system that having needs was dangerous or costly. Processing those memories doesn't erase them, but it does reduce the charge they carry — so they stop showing up as full-body dread every time you consider holding a limit.
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Cognitive work — telling yourself new things — has real limits when the pattern lives below the level of thought. If you've read the affirmations and done the journaling and you're still caving, it's not because you haven't tried hard enough. It's because the work needs to happen at a different level. That's exactly where the combination of DBT skills, EMDR, and relational pattern work comes in — it addresses the places that self-talk can't reach.
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Talk therapy often builds insight — and insight matters. But insight alone rarely changes what happens in the body when someone is standing in front of you waiting for an answer. My approach combines understanding with active skill-building, nervous system work through EMDR when it's needed, and consistent accountability. We track what's shifting between sessions and adjust. You're not just exploring. You're changing.
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They overlap significantly — difficulty holding limits and anxiety often feed the same cycle. But the focus is different. Anxiety therapy centers on the nervous system's alarm response and how to regulate it. Boundaries work centers on the relational patterns that developed around your needs — where they came from, what they're protecting, and how to show up differently in the relationships that matter most. For many clients, we're doing both at once.
You've been managing this for a long time.
You don't have to keep doing it alone.
There are a lot of therapists who work on relationship patterns and communication. What I offer is something more specific: a structured, trauma-informed process that works at the level where this actually lives — not just your communication style, but the nervous system patterns and relational history underneath it.
You've already proven you can manage this. You've been doing it for years. What we're working toward together isn't management. It's something different — the kind of change that shows up in your body when someone asks something of you that you don't want to give. In your voice when you answer. In the version of yourself you get to be when you're not spending half your energy making sure no one is disappointed with you.
If you're ready for therapy that goes beyond what you already understand about yourself, I'd be honored to be part of that.