MICHAELA KOZLIK, LCPC — Illinois therapist
Specializing in women's mental health, perimenopause anxiety & trauma | Illinois
About Me
The longer I do this work, the less interested I am being the therapist with all the answers. I am much more interested in what happens when someone has finally enough room to hear their own. I’ve worked with so many women who are so incredibly good at functioning. You go to work, take care of people, remember what everyone needs, solve the problems, and hold things together. And somewhere in all of that, you’ve gotten very far away from yourself.
You come to therapy thinking there is something you need to figure out.
Why am I so anxious? Why am I exhausted all the time? Why do I keep doing this in relationships?
Why can’t I just let things go? What is wrong with me lately?
And of course, we talk about those things. We get curious about where patterns came from. We pay attention to what happens in relationships, in the body, in your past and present.
But I’m not sitting across from you thinking, How do I fix this person?
I’m thinking:
What haven’t you had enough room to say?
What have you gotten really good at carrying and holding?
What do you already know but keep talking yourself out of?
And who are you when you don’t have to take care of anyone?
That’s become much more interesting to me than giving someone another set of coping skills because sometimes you already know how to cope. You’ve been coping for years. Sometimes the work is finally having somewhere you don’t have to.
I want therapy to be one of the few places in your week where you don’t have to perform.
You don’t have to make your feelings reasonable. You don’t have to show up with something important to talk about.
You can change your mind halfway through a sentence. You can laugh about something that hurts.
You can say, “I don’t know.” You can sit quietly. You can tell me you disagree with me.
You can show up tired and have absolutely no idea where to begin.
We can start there.
After more than twenty years of doing this work, I think that’s what I care about most. Not helping women become better versions of themselves, but helping them to finally stop leaving themselves behind.
I am here to create enough space for you to discover what changes when you don’t have to do that anymore.
My experience shaped my approach
EARLY CAREER
Domestic Violence Shelter
Working with women in crisis taught me that rebuilding yourself after profound trauma is possible.
FOLLOWING YEARS
Young Women Exiting Child Protective System
These were women building a life figuring out attachment, identity, and belonging from scratch. It taught me how much is possible when someone finally has a consistent person on their side.
MID CAREER
Community Mental Health
I learned to hold a lot without rushing toward resolution, without needing to fix it, move past it, or make it more comfortable than it is.
PRIVATE PRACTICE
Private practice gave me the freedom to work differently.
I choose to spend more time with fewer women and offer therapy that's thoughtful, relational, and deep.
NOW
My practice is always evolving with me...
Like many of the women I work with, I am moving through midlife and perimenopause myself. Living this season is reshaping how I understand and show up in this work. It has deepened my understanding of identity. loss, change, and what it means to begin again and again...
WHAT I BELIEVE ABOUT HEALING
I came to this work through my own story.
I grew up in a complicated family and learned early how to pay attention to what was happening around me, take care of other people, and keep a lot to myself. There was childhood trauma in my story, although I did not always have words for it or understand how much of it I carried with me into adulthood.
For a long time, I thought that was just who I was.
It took a long time for me to understand the difference between my personality and the ways I had learned to survive and protect myself.
My own healing happened over many years. Therapy was a big part of it, but so was learning to slow down to pay attention to myself. I began to understand why I reacted the way I did, why certain things felt so hard, and why some patterns followed me even when I knew better.
Eventually, I stopped seeing those parts of myself as things I needed to get rid of. They all had a history. They made sense.
That changed a lot for me. And it also shaped the therapist I became.
I have been doing this work for more than 20 years, and I have spent much of that time studying trauma, attachment, the nervous system, somatic therapy, and parts work. The training matters to me. But I also know that some things about healing can only be understood by living through them.
I know what it is like to have your past show up in your present.
I know what it is like to understand something in your head and wonder why you still can’t change it.
And I know that healing is rarely the clean, forward-moving process we wish it were.
Healing can be much more subtle, ordinary and unexpected in different ways.
That’s why I am not interested in helping women become better at coping with and pushing through their lives.
For me, therapy is not about becoming a better version of yourself. It’s really about understanding yourself better that you have more choice, more room to trust what you feel, and more freedom to stop repeating what doesn’t belong in your life anymore.
And, slowly, have more space to become who you are now.
TRAINING & CREDENTIALS
Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor (LCPC) · MA Forensic Psychology, The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, 2008 · Illinois telehealth therapy & therapy intensives statewide.
IFS-informed
Depth psychotherapy
Sensorimotor psychotherapy
Somatic trauma
Hakomi psychotherapy
Attachment-informed
Ongoing specialized training in trauma treatment, somatic approaches, and attachment theory as it applies to adult therapeutic work
Schedule a brief consultation with me
The consultation is a chance to get a sense of each other and decide if it feels right.