Leah Donatelli is a psychotherapist providing virtual care across North and South Carolina. Her specialities include anxiety, stress, creating healthy relationships with food, body image, self-care, and boundaries in relationships. It's the "golden child" who is great at taking care of and attuning to everyone but themselves that often find her. Many of Leah's patients come to therapy to explore what they value, what they want for their life, and to learn how to trust themselves. Her patients are highly motivated for change. Leah believes in a healthy balance of committed action, rest, and creativity for sustainable change to occur. Her approach is a blend of cognitive, mindfulness, and somatic techniques. Leah guides her patients to contact stuck points and shame-filled parts compassionately, connect to their soul essence, and pair insights with actions items to practice. Her patients learn how to hear the wisdom of their body; how it informs them about their attachment wounds, emotions, desires, and needs. By learning to trust the body's signals, Leah's patients learn to trust their whole self. After receiving treatment with Leah, her patients transition from neglecting themselves to experiencing self-care, less stress, peace with food, and healthy reciprocal relationships as non-negotiables. When clients start with Leah, they are often experiencing life from the head up, thinking their way through their challenges. Leah helps clients learn to feel their way through challenges remaining connected to and honoring of the wisdom inside. Leah's approach is full of the deepest empathy for what brought her clients to what they are experiencing in the present. Attentive listening and mindful curiosity are at the center of her practice. In addition to her master's in mental health counseling, Leah was trained by The Center for Body Trust™ and The Embodied Recovery Institute™ for Eating Disorders. Message to clientsCongratulations on taking some of the very first steps in reclaiming your life for yourself. It's the deepest honor to have you here. Throughout my life, therapy was a place for some of the safest care and most impressive inner and outer change. As a women raised in the Southern US, I was riddled with people-pleasing and a focus on how other's viewed me. I learned the smaller my body and voice was, the better I was treated. It was hard to really know what I liked myself as I was most focused on being liked. My relationship to food was painful and I never felt I was enough. Therapy taught me how to set healthier limits with my capacity, see my sensitivity as good, and create a life that worked for me. It helped me transition from the "shoulds" placed on me by culture to my individual human wants, needs, and desires. This is also my hope for you.I weave Polyvagal Theory and Embodiment Theory throughout my work. This creates a focus on your holistic self and how your nervous system responds to life. I utilize IFS parts work to help you get to learn about all the parts of you and develop healthy and healing relationships with them. I am aligned with Health at Every Size, The Center for Body Trust, and listen to the lived experience of your body in this world. Your well-being is my number one goal.