About Me

I’ve been doing this work for more than forty years.

And I’ve been doing other things for even longer.

I have never had a particularly tidy life or career. For years, I thought I needed to make it look tidier than it was—to present the respectable professional version and edit out the rest.

I don’t anymore, because the rest of it has everything to do with the woman and practitioner I became.

I’ve spent my life making my own way: Psychotherapist. Coach. Spiritual mentor. Teacher. Writer. Retreat leader. Musician. Painter. Ritual maker.

These don’t feel like separate lives to me anymore. They are one life.

There is a thread running through all of it: a fascination with what makes us human, what helps us heal, what gives our lives meaning, and what allows us to become most fully ourselves.

My work has always lived at that crossroads.

Psychology has never been enough for me by itself. Neither has spirituality. Neither has creativity. Neither has intellect or intuition.

Women are too interesting and complicated to be understood through one window.

I’m interested in history and possibility. Trauma and survival. Relationship and solitude. The life we’ve already lived and the life that may still be asking something of us.

I’m interested in meaning, mystery, mortality, the sacred—and what happens when certainty disappears.

I bring all of these ways of knowing into the room.

And then there is simply having lived. I’ve lived through divorce, single parenting, major illness, the deaths of parents and close friends, betrayal, and plenty of the other things life can throw at us.

I have lived through enough beginnings and endings to know that a life can change radically more than once. I know what it is to build something and leave something. To love and lose. To make mistakes. To discover that something I believed about myself wasn’t true.

And to find parts of myself decades after I might reasonably have expected all the important discoveries to be over.

Sometimes becoming more fully ourselves doesn’t require adding anything. Sometimes it means putting down what was never ours to carry.

And creativity isn’t something I do on the side. It is one of the ways I know the world. Music came first. Then writing and painting. These days, you will often find me at a loom, working with color and cloth.

Creativity can be a way of knowing, metabolizing experience, playing, and finding ourselves when words have taken us as far as they can. And sometimes, particularly in midlife and beyond, creativity is how an unlived part of a woman begins knocking on the door. I pay attention when that happens.

I’m not a blank screen.

If you’re looking for a therapist who sits quietly, nods wisely, and reveals virtually nothing of herself, I’m probably not your person.

I am warm. I listen deeply. I care deeply.

And I will tell you what I see. I ask questions. I make connections. I laugh. I can be irreverent.

I may challenge something you’ve believed for thirty years.

I may also tell you that something you’ve spent years trying to change doesn’t need fixing at all.

I don’t assume I know what your life should look like. I don’t want you to become more like me.

I want you to become more unmistakably you.

Interested in working together?

You can contact me at 206-427-1325 or Melissa@MelissaGayleWest.com