Who I Help · Women
Therapy for Women
A lot of women come in already doing everything they know how to do. The work here is not another technique for managing more. It is a look at who is carrying what, and why it has landed on you.
60-Minute Sessions · $200 · In Person or Telehealth in Utah
The Mental Load
Being the Capable One
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that does not come from any single task. It comes from being the one who remembers: the dentist appointment, the permission slip, whose mother needs a call this week, what is running low in the pantry, which relationship in the extended family needs tending before it curdles. None of it looks like much written down. All of it takes up room that never fully empties.
Women often become the capable one early, sometimes as a child managing a parent’s moods, sometimes later as the partner or employee who quietly picks up whatever gets dropped. Being capable is genuinely useful, and it is also how a person ends up running a household, a marriage and sometimes a team, while still being asked whether they can handle one more thing.
A common pattern is resentment with nowhere to go. It is hard to be angry at a partner who is not being cruel, just oblivious. It is hard to be angry at aging parents, or at a workplace that simply rewards whoever says yes. So the resentment gets swallowed, redirected into irritability at small things, or converted into more effort, as if working harder could resolve a problem that was never about effort in the first place.
Identity
Who You Are After the Role Changes
Identity questions tend to surface at transition points. A woman who has spent years as a caregiver (for children, for a parent, for a partner’s career) can reach a point where the caregiving eases and discover she genuinely does not know what she wants for herself, because the question has not been relevant in a long time. A career change, a divorce, or children leaving home can produce the same disorientation: the role is gone or changed, and whoever is left underneath it is unfamiliar.
Body image and self-worth often sit close to this. Many women learned to evaluate themselves by usefulness and appearance long before they learned to evaluate themselves by anything else, and those early metrics do not update on their own just because life has moved on. Friendship and family-of-origin expectations add another layer: the daughter who is supposed to call first, the friend who is supposed to plan the gathering, the sister who is supposed to smooth things over.
Systemic work looks at these expectations directly rather than treating them as private flaws. Who assigned this role to you? Who benefits from you keeping it? What happens if you stop?
The most important journey in life, is the journey within.
The Work
Renegotiating, Not Working Harder
The instinct, when something feels unmanageable, is to try to manage it better: a sharper calendar, an earlier alarm, one more system for keeping track. Sometimes that helps at the margins. It rarely touches the actual problem, which is usually an agreement that was never explicitly made and has quietly become permanent. Sessions spend real time identifying those agreements: who does what, who decided that, and whether it still makes sense.
That can mean individual work on your own patterns: where you took on a role before anyone asked, where guilt substitutes for a genuine no, where your worth got tied to output. It can also mean bringing a partner into a session or two, not to assign blame but to say plainly what has been happening and to build a different arrangement together. Couples sessions are 60 minutes at $250 when that is the more useful format.
Where a pattern of over-responsibility for other people’s feelings and needs is the central issue rather than a side effect, this overlaps closely with codependency work, and the two are often addressed together. The aim is not detachment or coldness. It is a version of capability that includes you.
Athena is not a prescriber and does not treat substance abuse, grief, or OCD as standalone concerns. She is licensed in Utah only, and sees clients in person in Salt Lake City or by telehealth anywhere in Utah.
Common Questions
Therapy for Women Questions
- Is this only for women who are struggling with something specific?
- No. Many women arrive without a single clear complaint: just a sense of being tired in a way that rest does not fix. That is a legitimate reason to start.
- Do you see couples if the issue is really about my marriage?
- Yes. Some of this work is individual and some is better done with a partner in the room, especially when the mental load is a shared household issue rather than a private one. Couples sessions are 60 minutes at $250.
- How long are sessions and what do they cost?
- Individual sessions are 60 minutes at $200. Couples sessions are 60 minutes at $250. Select Health, BCBS, UBH and University of Utah Health Plans are accepted.
- Can we meet by telehealth?
- Yes, in person at the Salt Lake City office or by telehealth. Athena is licensed in Utah only, so telehealth clients need to be located in Utah at the time of session.
Start With the Contact Form
Whether this is individual work or something to bring a partner into, send the contact form before anything is scheduled.