Dylan Olivia Tizon

You’ve done a lot of the things you were supposed to do. And honestly, you’ve built a life that looks pretty damn good from the outside. But now, you want it to FEEL good, too. You want to trust yourself more. Stop swallowing what you really think and feel just to keep the peace. Stop building your life around what everyone else needs, expects, or thinks you should do. Be more creative. Have more fun. Take the risk. Change your mind. Feel free enough to stop living the life you were supposed to want and start choosing the one you actually do. And then there’s the stuff you’re just tired of carrying... The memory that still feels way too close. The comment that can ruin your whole day. The reaction where one part of you is like, “Why am I still reacting this way?” but you can’t seem to stop it. You want to experience something that used to trigger you and realize huh, that just doesn’t hit the same anymore. It doesn’t take over your whole day or even your whole week. I’m Dylan (she/her), a biracial Filipino therapist from Seattle, now based in LA and working with clients across Washington, specializing in trauma. And I know a little something about realizing the life you built isn’t actually the life you want. I devoted most of my life to one career, found success, and then realized I didn’t want to do it anymore. So I started over. It’s scary to admit you don’t want something anymore when you worked really freaking hard to get it. And it can be just as scary to let yourself want something completely different. A lot of what interests me in therapy is why change can be so damn hard, even when you know exactly what you want to do differently. Part of you knows better. And another part of you is still reacting like the past is happening right now. You can reason with yourself, talk yourself down, know exactly what you “should” do, and still feel it happening. It’s an exhausting game of tug-of-war. And eventually, you can start wondering why the hell you can’t just figure this out on your own. Not to be the old-school therapy cliché, but yes, a lot of this can go back to experiences you had when you were really young. Your brain and body learned from those experiences, including ones you barely (or never) consciously think about anymore. With me, you don’t have to convince me it was “bad enough.” You don’t have to be embarrassed by your reactions, your big emotions, or the things you’re struggling with. Through the lens of trauma, it alllll makes sense to me. And that’s where I see a lot of hope for change. That’s why I use EMDR, Internal Family Systems (IFS), and brain and body based approaches. Instead of asking you to keep working so hard to override your reactions, we can get underneath them. I’m a big believer that therapy doesn’t always have to mean talking about the same things week after week for years. Sometimes we need more time and space to really get into it. That’s why I offer EMDR intensives. Longer, focused sessions give us room to stay with the work and can help create movement that might otherwise be spread out over weeks or months. We’ll talk, laugh, probably cry sometimes, and get curious about what comes up along the way. There’s room for big feelings, weird connections, things that don’t make sense yet, and the parts of yourself you’re still getting to know. Change can be scary, even when you know you want it. You can be nervous, skeptical, or have parts of you that aren’t totally on board yet. We can work with all of that and still make room for things to change. Together, we’ll dig deep.