Skin Cancer Support

It's not "just skin cancer."

Anyone who has said that to you, or implied it, has not been where you are.

Skin cancer carries a particular kind of loneliness. It is the cancer people feel permission to minimize, including sometimes the people closest to you. You may look fine. Your prognosis may be good. And you are still sitting with something that has changed how you understand your body, your future, and what you can count on. That is real. It deserves to be treated as real.

I was diagnosed with melanoma in 2025. I am not going to tell you that experience gave me everything I needed to understand yours, because it did not. What it gave me was a firsthand education in what it actually feels like to hear those words, to navigate a medical system that is often too busy to slow down with you, to watch the people around you not quite know what to do with what you are carrying. I know what it is to pretend you are okay because it is easier than explaining why you are not.

That is what I bring to this work, alongside 26 years as a licensed therapist.

What this work is

This is not a support group. It is not psychoeducation about coping with illness. It is not a protocol designed for cancer patients.

It is the same relational, depth-oriented, psychologically serious work I do with everyone, directed specifically at what a diagnosis like this actually does to a person. To how you understand yourself. To how you move through relationships. To what you thought you knew about your life and your body and your future.

Some of what surfaces after a diagnosis is directly about the cancer. Some of it turns out to be older than the cancer, things the diagnosis cracked open that were waiting. Both are worth attending to. We follow what is actually there, not a predetermined map of what cancer patients are supposed to feel.

What you will find here

You will not be managed. You will not be given worksheets or breathing techniques and sent home with homework. You will not be treated as fragile.

You will be taken seriously. You will be allowed to be angry, uncertain, dark, complicated, or inappropriately funny about all of it, because sometimes that is the most honest response available. You will be met by someone who is not performing empathy, because I find that condescending and you do not need it.

I will not minimize what you are going through to make either of us more comfortable. I will also not treat your diagnosis as the only thing you are. You are a person who has a diagnosis. That is different from being a patient.

Who this is for

This work is for people who want to think carefully and honestly about what this is doing to them and who they are becoming on the other side of it. It is for people who are tired of being handled gently when what they actually need is someone willing to be real with them.

It is not for people who are looking primarily for comfort or reassurance. I will not tell you it is going to be okay. I do not know that it is. What I can offer is company while you figure out how to live honestly inside uncertainty, which is a different thing and, I think, a more useful one.

A note on insurance and cost

I accept Blue Cross Blue Shield. The session fee is $150 without insurance.

If cost is a barrier, say so when you reach out. I keep a small number of reduced-fee slots for people who are genuinely unable to meet the full fee. I would rather have that conversation than have you decide before we talk that this is out of reach.