Alison Alderdice (she/her)

I've spent years working extremely hard in school, training, and as a leader so I've had many seasons of healing through my own burnout. I help clients understand why they overwork, over-promise, and don't set limits. My focus is on pragmatic ways to align lifestyle with values and needs in a realistic, sustainable manner. I also focus on coping strategies for dealing with cultural biases that promote unrealistic standards that disproportionately cause burnout in women and minorities.

I love helping clients explore the self-judgments and self-invalidations that underly their self-esteem issues. Most often, I find that people inherited these judgments and invalidations from their environment and identifying those origins can be a powerful first step to changing them. I support clients to learn to challenge their problematic thoughts and habits so they can approach their sense of self effectively and with self-compassion.

I am passionate about helping women navigate the unique pressures and stressors that they face in our society. I have extensive experience working with women across the lifespan (12-60yrs old), with a focus on young adulthood through middle age. I use an anti-racist approach to explore how intersectional identities interact with societal biases. Most of the women I work with struggle with perfectionism, indecisiveness, difficulty with assertiveness, and self-esteem issues.

This is a relatively new therapy that helps clients who struggle with having too much control to feel flexibility and ease in life (e.g., perfectionists/type-A personalities). The therapy examines biological and social roots that lead to over-control and helps clients increase flexibility and closeness in relationships. I am still in training but have been in an organization/consultation team practicing RO-DBT for the last 9 years as well as supervision. I complete training in 2025.

I am intensively trained in DBT and have practiced adherent DBT for years, but I currently only offer DBT-Informed therapy with relatively high functioning/low risk clients. For these clients, I bring the principals of behaviorism along with the practice and philosophy of Zen to help them feel ease and fulfillment in their lives. I use the mindfulness, emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness skills to guide clients to practical, life changing growth.

Feminist therapy treats clients of all genders and intersectional identities by honoring their agency and resilience. The philosophy is that to effectively treat any individual, you must consider the social, political, and cultural factors they have faced. I treat my clients as equals and see our different roles in the therapy as collaborations. I help them find empowerment by accurately labeling/differentiating between and trying to address the internal and societal issues impacting them.