Cissy Swiernik

Are you ready to understand yourself more deeply — your patterns, your triggers, the stories you’ve been telling yourself — and finally feel at home in your own life? If so, you’re in the right place.

I work with individuals, couples, and adolescents who are ready to do meaningful work. Not just manage symptoms, but actually understand what’s underneath them — and build something different.

What Working Together Looks Like

My greatest goal as a therapist is creating a space where clients feel genuinely safe to be themselves — often for the first time. That safety isn’t incidental. It’s the foundation. When the nervous system feels safe, real healing becomes possible.

From there, the work moves in three directions: understanding, rewriting, and building.
First, we get curious. What are your wounds, and where do they show up? Pain is information — it shows us where we need care. I draw on somatic awareness and nervous system regulation tools to help clients connect with what’s happening in the body, not just the mind, because the body keeps the score long after the story has been told.

Then, we interrupt. On the other side of discomfort is change — but change requires seeing the patterns clearly enough to rewrite them. Using an integrative approach including CBT, narrative therapy, parts work, and attachment-based approaches, I help clients examine their history, the stories they’ve inherited and decide which ones they want to keep.

Finally, we build. Every client leaves with an individualized therapeutic toolkit — practical, embodied tools for self-regulation, self-understanding, and self-advocacy. The goal is agency: the ability to determine how your own story gets written, knowing that you hold the pen.

Who I Work With
I welcome clients of all genders, and have a particular passion for working with women navigating identity, self-worth, and the journey toward authentic self-love — women who are done performing and ready to become themselves. I also specialize in the motherhood journey, including prenatal and postpartum mental health, pregnancy loss, and the transition into parenthood.

For couples, I focus on healthy communication, connection, and rebuilding trust. For adolescents, I provide a grounded, non-judgmental space to process the particular challenges of growing up.

Approach & Training
My approach is integrative and person-centered, drawing from CBT, narrative therapy, parts work, somatic therapy, trauma-informed care, and attachment-based models. I hold an MA in Psychology from Pepperdine University and am a Registered Associate Marriage and Family Therapist at Kinetic Mental Health.

I am also the author of a forthcoming book, Dress Like Yourself: Reclaim Your Style, Your Story, and Who You Were Always Meant to Be, which explores identity and authentic self-expression as pathways to healing.

And if you’re looking for something beyond one-on-one therapy, I facilitate the Dress Like Yourself 12-Week Group Therapy Program — an experiential, community-based experience where women come together to do the identity work from the book in real time. Think therapy meets style: you’ll explore your story, your patterns, and your sense of self through the surprisingly powerful lens of how you show up in the world — including how you dress. It’s part clinical, part creative, entirely transformative. Women leave with a deeper understanding of who they are, a toolkit for authentic self-expression, and a community of women who did the work alongside them. If that sounds like what you’ve been looking for, it probably is.

“Healing begins with being heard.” If you’re ready to be heard, I would love to work with you.