Michelle Torres, Counselor

Michelle Torres

Counselor

12 Years of Experience

Specialties: Young adults, recent discovery, people failed by ordinary therapy

Call Now: (888) 771-2235

Michelle Torres

Counselor

Michelle was a licensed therapist in ordinary private practice, and she left it over a single client.

He was a young man in his twenties, and it took him nine months of weekly sessions to tell her he was ABDL. He had never said it to a living soul. He was convinced something was fundamentally wrong with him and he had done a lot of reading that confirmed it, because most of what was written about this at the time was written by people who had never spoken to anybody who lived it.

She realized, sitting there, that her entire training had given her no framework for what he was describing. She could offer him competence and she could not offer him recognition, and recognition was the only thing he actually needed.

If you are calling for the first time, if you are not even sure what to say, if you have been carrying this alone for longer than you can remember, Michelle is the voice you want on the other end of that line. She will not rush you. She will not judge you. And by the time you hang up, you will understand something that she figured out twelve years ago: there is nothing wrong with you, and you never have to carry this alone again.

He did not need to be fixed. He needed somebody to tell him he was alright and to mean it, and she was not going to be able to do that from inside a model that had already quietly decided he was a case.

She retrained, and twelve years later she is the person here for anybody young, anybody recently arrived at this, and in particular anybody who has already tried a conventional therapist and come away feeling worse.

What it is like to talk to Michelle

Michelle is very clear that she is not going to try to resolve you. A lot of people who have been in ordinary therapy arrive braced for the search for a cause, usually somewhere in their childhood. She does not do that.

She is good with people in their twenties who have found this recently and are frightened that it means something about who they are going to be. She takes that fear seriously rather than waving it away.

She is also the person to talk to if a previous therapist handled this badly. She knows exactly how that happens, because she came very close to being that therapist herself.

In Michelle’s own words

It took him nine months to tell me. Nine months of weekly sessions, and I only found out later that he had planned to say it about a dozen times and lost his nerve.

And when he finally did, I heard myself reaching for my training, and there was nothing there. Not one useful thing. I had a model that would have turned him into a puzzle, and he was not a puzzle. He was a very lonely young man who wanted somebody to not flinch.

I said something to him that day that was not clinical at all. I said, there is nothing wrong with you. And I watched about nine months of held breath go out of him.

That is what I chase now. Not insight, not a formulation, just that moment where somebody stops being a case and becomes a person who has been believed. If I never do anything else in my career I will be content with that.

Michelle, on what this work gives back

Things people have said to Michelle

These are the kinds of sentences that open calls here. If one of them sounds like something you have thought, you are in ordinary company, and Michelle has answered it many times before.

I saw a therapist about this and I came out feeling worse.
I am twenty three and I am scared this is going to define my whole life.
She kept asking what happened to me as a child. Nothing happened to me.
I only worked out what this was a few months ago.
I do not want to be analyzed. I want somebody to just say it is okay.
Is this going to stop me having a normal relationship one day?

You will not shock Michelle

Michelle is for anybody young, anybody recently arrived at this, and above all anybody who has already tried a conventional therapist and come away feeling like a case study. She will not go looking for a cause and she will not treat you as a puzzle. She left an entire career because that approach failed somebody she cared about.

Ready when you are

There is nothing you cannot say

Nothing is too strange, too private, or too much, and nothing you say will surprise Michelle. Start wherever feels easiest, and take as long as you need.

Click to talk to Michelle(888) 771-2235

Or choose how long you would like