ABOUT DR. ELLE
I work at the intersection of achievement, identity, and self-worth.
My clients are often people — individuals and couples — who have been rewarded, sometimes spectacularly, for their performance (e.g., executives, artists, actors, founders, etc.). Their success has required discipline, intensity, resilience, and exceptional output.
From the outside, their lives may look enviable. But internally, many live with the same pressure: the sense that their worth is only as secure as their performance, relevance, image, income, or next success.
As a licensed clinical psychologist, I help high-performing people separate their worth from their achievements without giving up ambition, excellence, or drive.
This is the center of my work: understanding how the inner critic, pressure, identity, self-worth, and performance become entangled — and how people can begin to live with more freedom, clarity, and meaning.
I bring over two decades of clinical experience to this work, along with writing and media experience on self-worth, the inner critic, and the psychology of achievement. I'm also the founder of Inner Compass Institute, where I'm building tools to bring this work to broader audiences.
I also know these dynamics personally enough to recognize the difference between insight that sounds good and change that actually holds under pressure.
My work is direct, thoughtful, and practical. It is not about lowering standards. It is about helping people stop using success as proof that they deserve to exist.
Because the goal is not to become less excellent. The goal is to become less owned by what excellence has cost.
Click here to get in touch.
Dr. Elle