Dr. Ryan Kitts Schallon, PsyD · Individual & Couples Therapy
It usually does. There's a reason the thing you've been telling yourself isn't quite working anymore — a reason the same situation keeps finding you, wearing different names.
Therapy, at its best, is the practice of getting curious about that reason. Not to explain it away, but to understand it well enough that it stops running the show from behind the curtain.
I work from a psychodynamic framework, which means I take the past seriously — not because it determines everything, but because the patterns that organize our present lives were usually built for conditions that no longer exist, and they tend to keep operating long after the context that created them has changed.
"No one is a neutral observer in the room.
I'm not trying to be."
What I bring into the room is a genuine belief that the stories we tell about ourselves — and the ones we've been told, over and over, until they stopped feeling like stories and started feeling like facts — are rarely the whole picture. They are almost never the only available picture.
My training is psychodynamic, which means I care about where things come from. Not because the past explains everything, but because the patterns that organize our present lives were usually built for conditions that no longer exist. They were adaptive once. They solved a real problem, in a real environment, for a real version of you that needed them to. Therapy is, in part, the chance to look at what that original problem was — and whether the solution still fits.
I'm also genuinely interested in literature, philosophy, and the way a piece of art can suddenly make visible something that weeks of careful conversation couldn't quite reach. I think the self is more literary than clinical — more shaped by narrative and accumulated meaning than by category or diagnosis. Which means the work tends to feel less like assessment and more like close reading.
What I am curious about is subjectivity — yours, and mine, and the way the two of them encounter each other in the room. There is no neutral ground in that encounter. There is no view from nowhere. What I offer, instead, is the sustained attention of someone who takes that seriously: who knows that how you see something is as much a part of the picture as what you're seeing.
I work with anxiety, depression, life transitions, identity, relationship difficulties, and the general experience of being a person whose inner life is not quite making sense to them. The thing I'm most interested in is the version of you that doesn't quite fit anywhere else. That one, in my experience, is usually where the most interesting work begins.
The space was chosen for what it can hold.
It's large — large enough that the hour doesn't feel compressed, that there's room to pace if that's what the thinking requires, or to sit quietly if it doesn't. There is natural light. There are books, but you are not required to read them. There is a couch that is genuinely comfortable, and enough distance between the furniture that the room doesn't feel like an interrogation.
What the space is built for, practically, is what psychoanalysis has always called free association — the permission to say whatever comes, in whatever order it comes, without editing for coherence or relevance or the fear of sounding strange. The room is meant to support that. It is deliberately not a medical office, with its clipboard and its desk arranged to produce a particular power relation. It is not a living room either. It is a room with a specific function: to make it possible to think thoughts you couldn't quite think elsewhere.
The hope is that over time, the room itself becomes part of the work. That your nervous system learns to associate it with permission. That you walk in, and something in you — the part that has been braced, that has been performing, that has been carefully managing the version of itself it shows the world — begins, slowly, to exhale.
That exhale is where most of the real work happens.
People carry more than one version of themselves into any given hour. The space is large enough to hold all of them — the one who arrived prepared with something to say and the one underneath who wasn't sure any of it was the real subject. Neither has to wait outside.
Therapy is not a diagnostic exercise. It is a sustained encounter between two people trying to understand something — usually something the client already knows, in some register, but hasn't been able to hold in full light yet. That's what we're here to do.
Something isn't working the way you thought it would.
Most of what brings people to therapy is some version of the same question: why do I keep doing this? Why can't I stop? Why does this feel the way it feels, and not the way I think it should?
We work together to find the patterns — not to name them and put them away, but to understand what they were solving for, and whether something better is available now. The goal isn't to produce a more functional person. It's to produce a more genuinely inhabitable one.
I work with anxiety, depression, life transitions, identity, relational difficulties, and the general experience of carrying something that doesn't have a name yet but keeps costing you something.
The architecture of the self is still actively under construction.
Working with adolescents is different. The questions that feel most urgent often are. The intensity isn't disproportionate — it's a genuine reading of the stakes, which are real: the patterns forming now are the ones that will need renegotiating later, and the renegotiating is easier if they've been named.
I take teenagers seriously. The goal isn't to get someone to "manage" their inner life more efficiently. It's to help them become curious about it — to discover that the self, however strange and contradictory and still assembling itself, is something worth knowing.
Relationships are the primary site of both wound and repair.
What couples bring into the room is rarely only about what they say it's about. There's usually something older underneath it — something more interesting, and more important, than the presenting conflict. The argument that keeps repeating itself is almost never about what it's repeating itself about.
Couples work is the practice of slowing that cycle down enough to see what's actually driving it. Not to assign blame, and not to achieve some negotiated armistice — but to understand what each person is trying to get, and whether they can help each other get there.
If you're not sure which of these fits what you're dealing with, that's fine — it usually clarifies in the first conversation. I offer a free 15-minute consultation: no commitment, no paperwork, just a chance to talk about what you're carrying and whether this might be a useful place to bring it.
Schedule a ConsultationIf something here resonated — if you recognized yourself somewhere in the description of the work, or you've been sitting with the idea of starting therapy and needed one more thing to push you — the next step is just a conversation.
I offer a free 15-minute consultation for prospective clients. It doesn't commit you to anything. It's a chance to talk about what you're carrying and whether this feels like the right place to bring it.
Fees are on a sliding scale. I'll do what I can to make this accessible.
Or call directly — whichever feels more natural.
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