Elizabeth Harding, LMFT
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Petaluma, CA
Welcome. I'm Elizabeth Harding, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT #135626) in private practice in Petaluma, California. I offer both in-person therapy sessions at my Petaluma office and telehealth sessions for clients located anywhere in California.
If you've found your way here, you may be carrying something heavy. Relationship strain, anxiety that won't quiet down, a life transition that's left you unsure of your footing, or old patterns that keep showing up no matter how hard you try to change them. This is work I take seriously, and I'm glad you're looking.
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My Approach to Therapy
Therapy, at its best, is a relationship. I work collaboratively with my clients, bringing clinical expertise to the work while also staying attuned to what each person actually needs in the room. I don't believe in one-size-fits-all treatment. The frameworks I draw on are grounded in evidence-based practice, and they're always held alongside genuine curiosity about your particular history, context, and goals.
My training as a Marriage and Family Therapist means I was trained to understand people in the context of their relationships and systems, not just as isolated individuals. Even when someone comes to me for individual therapy, we often find that the relational dynamics in their life are central to what's bringing them in.
I hold a warm, direct style. I will track the patterns I see with you, offer honest observations when they might be useful, and create enough safety for you to do the hard work of honest self-examination. I take humor seriously when it's real, and I take silence seriously when that's what's needed.
Who I Work With
I work with individuals and couples navigating a range of concerns, including:
- Anxiety and chronic stress, including generalized anxiety, social anxiety, and the particular exhaustion of always feeling like you need to hold everything together
- Relationship challenges, including communication breakdowns, conflict patterns, intimacy concerns, and the slow drift that can happen between partners
- Life transitions, including career changes, parenthood, loss, relocation, identity shifts, and the disorientation that can accompany major change
- Family of origin work, exploring how the family system you grew up in shaped the patterns you carry into adulthood and current relationships
- Depression and low mood, including the kind that doesn't look like sadness from the outside but feels like flatness, disconnection, or going through the motions
- Identity and self-worth, questions about who you are, what you want, and why the gap between those things keeps feeling so wide
My practice is affirming and welcoming to clients across a broad range of backgrounds, identities, and life circumstances.
Explore My Areas of Focus
Learn more about the specific approaches and specialties that guide my work with individuals and couples.
Couples Therapy
For partners navigating communication breakdowns, recurring conflict, growing distance, or significant rupture.
Learn MoreAnxiety Therapy
For individuals living with generalized anxiety, social anxiety, chronic stress, or the exhaustion of holding it all together.
Learn MoreTrauma Therapy
For those carrying the weight of past experiences that continue to shape how they move through relationships and daily life.
Learn MoreIFS Therapy
Internal Family Systems offers a compassionate framework for understanding the different parts of yourself and how they work together.
Learn MoreGottman Method
A research-based approach to couples therapy focused on building friendship, managing conflict, and creating shared meaning.
Learn MoreMy Specialties
Anxiety Therapy
Anxiety is one of the most common reasons people come to therapy, and one of the most frequently misunderstood. It tends to be treated as something to be managed or overridden, when the more useful question is what the anxiety is doing there in the first place. In my practice, I approach anxiety as a protective response, one that developed for real reasons and that is still trying to do a job. The goal isn't to eliminate it but to understand it well enough that it stops running your life.
I work with generalized anxiety, social anxiety, panic, health anxiety, and anxiety that is primarily activated within relationships. Using Internal Family Systems, we get curious about the part that carries the worry. Using Attachment Theory, we explore where the underlying fear originates. Both approaches tend to produce more durable change than coping strategies alone, because they address the source rather than the symptom.
Trauma Therapy
Trauma work is not about revisiting painful experiences for their own sake. It is about helping the nervous system process what it couldn't fully integrate at the time, so those experiences stop showing up uninvited in your present life. This might look like hypervigilance that makes real rest impossible, emotional reactions that feel disproportionate, or relationship patterns that keep recreating familiar harm without any conscious intention to do so.
I work with adults and teenagers navigating acute trauma, complex developmental trauma, and relational trauma, using an approach that draws on Internal Family Systems, Attachment Theory, and somatic awareness. We build internal safety and resources before approaching the harder material. The pace is determined by what your system can actually tolerate, not by what would be most efficient in theory.
Couples Therapy and the Gottman Method
Couples come to therapy at all different stages. Some arrive in significant distress after years of the same unresolved arguments. Others come relatively early, noticing patterns they'd like to change before they become entrenched. Both situations are workable. I draw primarily on the Gottman Method in my couples work, an approach grounded in four decades of research on what differentiates relationships that last from those that don't.
The Gottman research identifies specific communication patterns that predict relationship breakdown and offers concrete tools for changing them. In sessions, this looks like examining how conflict starts and escalates, identifying what's underneath the gridlock, and building the kind of everyday connection that makes repair possible when things go sideways. I have completed Gottman Level 1 training through the Gottman Institute. Premarital counseling is also available for couples who want to address patterns before they become problems.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy
Internal Family Systems is a model for understanding the inner life that many clients find immediately intuitive. The premise is that the mind is not a single unified voice but a system of parts, each carrying its own perspective, history, and role. Some parts hold pain from earlier experiences. Others developed specifically to protect against that pain, through strategies that once worked but may now be creating their own problems. When you feel pulled in contradictory directions, or stuck in patterns that don't respond to insight or willpower, you are often experiencing that internal system at work.
IFS therapy builds a relationship between those parts and the core Self, a stable, curious, compassionate center that is always present even when it feels completely out of reach. Clients often describe the shift from fighting their inner experience to getting curious about it as one of the most useful things that has happened in their treatment. It changes not just the symptoms but the relationship with the self that generates them.
About My Training and Licensure
I hold a Master of Arts in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Sonoma State University and am licensed by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences as a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT #135626). My graduate training emphasized systemic and relational approaches to treatment, which means I was trained to understand clients in the context of their relationships and life systems rather than in isolation. That lens shapes how I work even in individual therapy.
In addition to foundational licensure, I have completed Gottman Level 1 training through the Gottman Institute. I work with adults and teenagers (ages 13 and older) individually, and with couples. My practice is inclusive and affirming across identities, orientations, and relationship structures.
Ongoing learning is a consistent part of my professional practice. The fields of Internal Family Systems, attachment research, and couples therapy each have active research communities, and staying current with that literature is part of how I work.
Individual Therapy
Individual therapy offers dedicated time and space to examine what's happening in your life and your inner world, with a trained clinician as your thinking partner. Sessions are 50 minutes and held weekly or biweekly, depending on what you're working on and what serves you best.
Many people find that the consistent, focused nature of individual therapy helps them move through things they've been stuck on for years. Not because therapy is magic, but because regular, honest, supported reflection actually changes how the brain organizes experience over time. I take a collaborative approach to setting goals for our work together and revisiting those goals as we progress.
Couples Therapy
When couples come to therapy, they often arrive at the end of a long stretch of trying to figure it out on their own. That's normal, and it's not too late. Couples therapy can help when communication has broken down, when the same fights keep cycling through your relationship, when distance has grown, or when you're navigating a significant rupture and trying to decide what comes next.
I work with couples who are in long-term committed relationships, married or unmarried, and across a range of relationship structures and identities. The work is honest, which means I will track both partners' patterns, not just validate the perspective of whoever scheduled the appointment.
Telehealth and In-Person Sessions
I offer both in-person sessions at my Petaluma office and telehealth sessions conducted via secure video platform. Telehealth sessions are available to California residents statewide. Many clients find telehealth to be an effective and convenient way to maintain consistent therapy even with busy schedules, long commutes, or other logistical constraints.
For clients who are new to therapy or unsure whether telehealth is right for them, I'm happy to discuss format options during an initial consultation.
Location and Contact
My office is located in downtown Petaluma, accessible by car and public transit. Street parking is available in the surrounding area.
Getting Started
The first step is a consultation, a chance for us to talk briefly about what's bringing you in and whether working together feels like a good fit. I encourage you to approach this as a two-way conversation. You're not just looking for any therapist; you're looking for a therapist who is right for you.
To schedule a consultation, please visit my Contact page or call 707-634-4927.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Schedule a Consultation