Meet Erica
I’ve sat in a lot of spaces.
On both sides of the therapy couch. In the wings of a theatre and the middle of the stage. In temples, mosques, synagogues, churches, crypts, and ancient sacred sites. In ceremonies and teepees, longhouses and mud huts, Burning Man art carts, Chinese tea houses, and humbly decorated shacks. In a hospital room, wondering if I would leave.
What I’ve learned from every space I’ve entered is this: the spaciousness of a room has nothing to do with its walls. It expands with the emotional range of the people inside it. And that range grows with attunement. A mud hut full of presence holds more than a cathedral full of performance.
Those who study group dynamics and relational healing call this the field: the shared relational space that emerges between people when presence deepens. What becomes available in that field exceeds what any individual brings alone. I’ve felt it in ceremonies and in theatre wings and in small online circles at midnight. The container is never the building. It’s always what the people inside it are willing to bring.
Homestays in Ghana, India, Morocco, Japan, Peru. Two years in Indonesia as a Peace Corps volunteer. A semester circumnavigating the world on a ship. More than twenty countries, five continents, communities that had almost nothing by Western standards and an emotional sophistication that most of us in the West have quietly forgotten.
What I kept seeing in all of them was the same thing I eventually learned to see in myself: most people are not broken. They are carrying something real, in conditions that weren’t always designed to support them, and they have been taught to treat that as a personal failing. They have learned to make themselves smaller, quieter, more manageable, in spaces that didn’t know what to do with the full size of them.
Affinity Pathfinder exists for people looking for more room.
But the beginning was somewhere else.
I grew up in a family of sensitive people with a limited capacity to stay with emotion. Not because they were bad at it by nature, but because no one had ever shown them another way. When feelings got too big, they came out sideways, or they got suppressed entirely, managed until they couldn’t be anymore.
I was perceptive, sensitive, the kid who felt everything. In that environment, that wasn’t a gift. It was a problem to be solved.
At seven, my pediatrician passively suggested it might be bipolar disorder. My psychologist ran with that assumption without questioning it. A psychiatrist medicated me for the next ten years of my formative life. No one along the way asked what was happening at home. No one wondered why a small child was exhausted and overwhelmed. Each person in the chain deferred to the last, and I became the diagnosis instead of the kid behind it.
The message, never said out loud but impossible to miss: the problem is you.
Looking back, I understand those years differently now. What had been interpreted primarily as disorder also made sense as a nervous system responding to an environment it didn’t yet have the resources to navigate. Both things can be true. What I know is that the framing I was handed didn’t ask the right questions.
The justification came slowly and then all at once. In high school I found my theatre people, kids with just as much emotional range as me, held inside safety and creative expression and genuine compassion. I started getting better. At seventeen I went off my Depakote. At eighteen I moved out. I haven’t looked back at that diagnosis since. I excelled in college, at work, in friendship. My wellbeing still fluctuates, but I’ve gotten more comfortable and more compassionate with the fluxes.
What the diagnosis called disorder, a regulated environment revealed as range.
I tell you this not because we’ll be working with your psychiatric history in the coaching room. But because knowing what it feels like to be misread by a system that was supposed to help is part of what I bring to every session.
Theatre saved me before I had language for why.
In a home where emotion was either weaponized or suppressed, the stage was the first place that would hold the full range of what I carried. On stage, grief had purpose. Rage was welcome. Joy didn’t have to be earned.
I studied theatre, earned my BA in it, and turned out to be the kind of actor directors called when they needed someone who could play multiple parts in one show. Old women, young men, gay, straight, the shapeshifter Puck, the Wicked Witch of the West. I was versatile in the way that only happens when you’ve spent years learning to inhabit contradictory truths without collapsing any of them.
Playing the Wicked Witch taught me something I’ve never stopped using. Underneath the green paint and the fury was a broken heart. What looks like villainy from the outside can be devastation on the inside. What gets labeled as the problem is usually the most intelligent response available to an impossible situation.
I didn’t know the word somatic yet. I didn’t know about co-regulation or polyvagal theory or Internal Family Systems. But I was already doing parts work on stage without a name for it: learning that every character, no matter how dark or strange or difficult, had an interior logic that deserved to be understood rather than judged.
The stage didn’t diagnose me. It witnessed me.
And being witnessed, it turns out, can be profoundly healing.
Then the world confirmed what I was beginning to suspect.
Peace Corps in Indonesia. Homestays across five continents. And Peru, where I participated in ceremonial plant medicine work in the Sacred Valley that opened things I didn’t know were closed.
I watched grief held in circles instead of processed alone. Conflict metabolized through rhythm and ritual. Belonging distributed across whole communities rather than concentrated in a single exhausted family unit.
And I recognized the patterns that had shaped my childhood: the suppression, the control, the punishment of feeling, the insistence that distress is individual rather than systemic. They weren’t just my family’s dysfunction. They were cultural. Architectural. They showed up everywhere.
That wasn’t comfortable to see. It was important.
When I came home I became a therapist. I trained in IFS, Brainspotting, Somatic Experiencing, and EFT. I developed and taught a university course on self-care as self-preservation, grounded in Audre Lorde’s work. And I built Affinity Pathfinder because healing doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens in relationship, in community, in the body, in practice repeated enough times that the nervous system actually starts to believe something has changed.
How I actually work.
Sessions can start wherever you are. We can open the filing cabinet of your past or work entirely in the present. You lead.
What I do differently: most of what a clinician thinks stays on the notepad. I share it in real time. How I’m conceptualizing what you’re bringing, what I’m noticing, what I know about the patterns you’re describing. You’re not in the dark about what’s happening in the room. Transparency is part of the method.
I’m happy to pivot if you just need to talk it out. But I always have something up my sleeve. A somatic intervention, a reframe, a question that cracks something open. I’ll bring it when it’s needed and hold it when it’s not.
I’ll also bring context you might not expect. The sociopolitical dynamics underneath a personal pattern. Who organizes around whose needs and whose pain. What a relational dynamic has to do with systems of power. Not to explain your life away, but because context is part of understanding, and understanding is part of changing.
And then: what do we do with it? What moves the needle today?
I can meet you in the gritty details. The texts, the screenshots, the group chat drama. I can sit in that with you without judgment and without flinching. And when the wheels start spinning, I’ll call you into a deeper wisdom. Both are available in the same session.
I also bring the body into the room in ways that go beyond talk. Whatever I’m learning, new somatic approaches, emerging research, frameworks that are changing how I understand what’s happening underneath the surface, I integrate as I go. This work is alive for me. I’m not delivering a fixed curriculum.
And underneath all of it is a default position I take seriously: I am a curious student of you. You are the expert on your own life. I bring training, perspective, and genuine engagement. You bring the only real authority in the room. That’s not a disclaimer. It’s how I actually orient.
You might be a good fit if.
- You understand yourself intellectually but keep finding yourself in the same place. You’ve done therapy, read the books, done the reflection. Knowing your patterns hasn’t been enough to shift them.
- You feel things intensely and have spent years learning to manage that rather than trust it.
- You want someone who will actually tell you what they think, not just reflect your words back at you.
- You’re navigating something real right now: a relationship rupture, a transition, an identity question, a pattern you’re exhausted by, a grief that doesn’t have a name yet.
- You want context alongside the feelings. You want to understand what’s actually happening, structurally and somatically, not just emotionally.
- You’re interested in the bigger picture. How your personal experience connects to the systems and structures you’ve moved through. You don’t want your healing to happen in a vacuum.
- You’re ready to move something. Not perfectly, not all at once. But you want to take a step.
- You don’t need to perform okayness in the room. You can bring the texts, the screenshots, the thing you’re embarrassed about. All of it is welcome here.
What I bring.
Clinical training in IFS, Brainspotting, Somatic Experiencing, and EFT. A decade in theatre. Two years in Peace Corps. Over twenty countries lived in and learned from. A university curriculum on self-preservation as political act. Ceremonial plant medicine work in Peru. My own long process of unlearning what I was taught about myself.
And something harder to name: a genuine curiosity about the full complexity of the person across from me. Not just the presenting pattern. The whole person. Where they came from, what they’ve adapted to, what they’ve been told about themselves that was never actually true.
I currently work as a digital nomad. That’s given me a lived practice of what it actually takes to lose, rebuild, and maintain an internal compass across very different places and phases of life. I know what it is to be far from home and still have to find yourself.
What people say about working together.
“I’ve been to many other therapists who I don’t get much out of. We just talk and I feel like I could get that from friends for free. My sessions with Erica are worth every penny. She has changed my life.”
“I tell my friends about her and when we exchange stories, I just feel so lucky I found one of the good ones. Her wisdom, guidance, and insight during our sessions helped me so much during one of my toughest years and I’m forever thankful.”
“I’ve had my fair share of therapists over the years. Erica is hands down the best therapist I’ve ever connected with.”
“After our sessions, I often think to myself: that was really needed. Really helpful. I feel a tremendous lift. I don’t know how long it’ll last or what comes next, but our sessions have visceral impact. I so appreciate her energy and the real connectedness I get from working things through with her. I have been through so many therapists trying to find healing in a broken mental healthcare system. She is a unicorn.”
“Erica made a huge impact on me and helped me grow. She showed me a lot I didn’t know and I will continue to use everything she’s given me. I wouldn’t have made it to where I am without her.”
Testimonials shared with permission and anonymized by initials.
A few things I want you to know.
I am not the expert on your life. You are. I bring a flashlight, a sense of the terrain, and a really good compass. This is your path. I’m here to help you walk it.
I’m integrated in LGBTQ+ community and work with people across the full spectrum of identity, orientation, and relationship structure.
I believe sensitivity is intelligence. That the body is never the enemy. That healing doesn’t happen in isolation. That what we refuse to feel is, eventually, what we refuse to change.
I built Affinity Pathfinder to be what I needed when I was seven years old, and what I kept needing for the twenty years after that.
A place where feeling is wisdom. Where the full complexity of who you are is welcomed rather than managed. Where the work of coming back to yourself is understood as both personal and collective.
I’ve sat in a lot of spaces. Every single one of them has taught me the same thing: people don’t need to be fixed. They need to be witnessed. With curiosity, compassion, deep presence, and celebration.
That’s what I’m here to do.
That means bringing joyful presence to the entire tapestry of you. Not just the parts you’d put on a highlight reel. The messier parts, the ones you’ve been managing or hiding or dragging around quietly: those tend to be the richest with wisdom. The uglier the thread, sometimes, the more it has to teach.
When I say joyful I don’t mean happy. I mean fully present. Fully engaged with whatever is, without inflating it or contracting away from it. Just being with, completely. When two nervous systems expand into genuine attunement, when the performance drops and something more real takes its place, that is joy as I understand it. Not a peak experience. A practice of radical authenticity, in connection.
Even that is worth celebrating. Especially that, actually.
You don’t have to have it figured out before you reach out. That’s what the first conversation is for.