Delayna Choat

Delayna Choat, LMFT

Clients I work with: Couples, tweens/teens and their families, parents, young adults, adult individuals, and adult families.

Issues I work with: Communication, couple and family relationships, parenting, anxiety, depression, ADHD, neurodivergence, grief and loss, trauma, self-worth, emotional regulation, relationship patterns, emotional intimacy and connection, childhood experiences, intergenerational cycle breaking, school issues, behavioral concerns, life transitions, premarital/ pre-commitment concerns, and boundaries.

 

My Approach

As humans, we all have a unique story, forged from the sum total of our lived experiences. Our personhood is shaped and impacted by the thousands of interactions we have with important others across the life cycle, sending messages about what is loveable, acceptable, and worthy about us. Family dynamics, childhood experiences, friendships, love relationships, transitions, and losses offer both resources and hurts that, left unorganized, can skew our sense of self.

I work with clients to dive more deeply into the origins of who they are and how life and relationships have shaped them. When you look deeper into your story, you can get a better understanding of how you have learned to navigate connection, emotions, conflict, boundaries, and relational needs. As you organize what has shaped you, you can reclaim your power to heal and resolve old patterns and find new ways to be more fully yourself.

We can explore the stuck points, protectors, adaptations, and threat mitigation strategies you have leaned on up until now. Along the way, I can help you access and harness your inner resources, wisdom, and resilience. Human beings are incredibly skilled at finding ways to deal with challenges, overwhelm, and unmet needs, and I want to reassure you that you have been doing the best you can with what has been available to you. My role is to help you make sense of how you have coped and responded so far, so that you can know both the brilliance of your strategies and that other possibilities that are available.

Whether you lean on shutting down or withdrawing, overfunctioning or pursuing, people-pleasing, controlling, perfectionism, isolation, or giving up your power, you have come by these strategies as a means of getting what you need as best you can. While these protective strategies might have reduced the hurt of feeling rejected, unimportant, or not enough, they also serve to limit your full potential, self-worth, and sense of satisfaction in life.

If you find yourself stuck within a pattern and ways of being that don’t get you what you need or serve you in a healthy way, I can walk alongside you. Life was never meant to be walked alone, and through connection, we can create safety. I value the interconnectedness of all aspects of your life, social, emotional, relational, and spiritual.  

Individual Therapy

Society can often tell us that being busy equates to being successful or capable. We can overbook, overextend, and often ignore our own needs to tend to the needs of others.  If you are vulnerable to saying yes out of obligation, real or imagined, or out of a fear that if you say no, you are letting somebody down, I can help. 

I can help you to go deeper, to the origins of your pain and struggle. Together, we will lean into your past experiences and how they influence present-day patterns. Discovering the ways these experiences, relationships, and patterns have shaped you. Together, we will work on healing, giving permission to honor your needs, and finding freedom from burdens that were never yours to carry.

Together, in a safe and nurturing space, I can help you to explore and identify moments of pain, validate your emotions, and help you heal from the inside out. Sometimes we have parts that get stuck, frozen, or hidden away that need going back for. I can support you to give them a voice, process their experience, and help you unburden them of the hurts and mistruths they have been carrying.

I consider it a privilege to offer you a place to slow down, be human, and connect with yourself. Where you can let go of performance and perfectionism and let in love, boundaries, and balance. As you work through challenges, you uncover your strengths and resilience.

Couples Therapy

When working with couples, I am always advocating for your relationship and your connection with one another. I specialize in creating an atmosphere of safety for both you and your partner. I work to help you both understand your individual emotions, needs for connection, and the threat-mitigation strategies that come alive during moments of miss, disconnection, or conflict.

Chances are that you are in a relationship with somebody who is completely different than you, grew up differently, and responds to life differently. While these differences can be helpful and a resource, they can also create ongoing patterns of misunderstanding, invalidation, and protection. Over time, these patterns start to feel like a hamster wheel you just can’t seem to get off of.

I can walk you through the process of uncovering and tending to attachment wounds, whether the origins are in your current love relationships or in past connections. By embracing emotions and your very human needs for connection, I support partners to share their fears, stress, and emotional needs more openly. This openness helps to de-escalate old cycles, rebuild trust, and foster a deeper, more secure emotional connection.

We can also work together to examine and reframe the stories and narratives that each of you holds about yourselves and your relationship. This includes exploring how past experiences, attachment histories, messages, and experiences of relationships influence your current beliefs and behaviors. By addressing these narratives, we can better understand how your life and relationship experiences are shaping your present challenges.

I will guide you in slowing everything down and help you identify the emotions and missed needs that underpin your struggles. From there, I can help you find more satisfying ways to reach for and respond to each other. Step by step, I support partners to deepen security, emotional intimacy, and trust with each other.

Sessions explore ways to get curious and become a ‘student’ of learning about each other. We all long to be seen, heard, understood, cherished, and safe with our partner. I offer a space that values curiosity, open communication, vulnerability, and lasting change.

Family Therapy with Children Aged 12 and up/h3>

Adolescence is an exciting, but also confusing and challenging time. Your child is experimenting with who they are and where they belong. In a world where your child has access to information more than ever, it can be difficult to feel secure in who you are. I am passionate about helping your child explore their sense of self and gain confidence in their passions, boundaries, identity, and capabilities. My goal is to support tweens and teens to scaffold a solid sense of who they are and what makes them special and worthy in the world, so they have the security they need to continue to explore, make mistakes, and balance connection with being an individual.  

As parents, you may be finding that previously effective parenting strategies are no longer working. You may notice your child’s personality change, or they might be more sensitive than usual. Distress in tweens and teens tends to show up as a decreased ability to tolerate emotions or transitions, acting out or tantrums, academic issues, withdrawing from relationships or activities they previously enjoyed, behavioral challenges, or somatic issues such as aches or pains.

Your child’s behavior makes much more sense when you view them as a need for love, connection, and safety. Emotions and stress often get expressed in ways that can be problematic, big, and baffling. My role is to support children and their parents to decipher the mixed messages and know that most behaviors are often a cry for connection, co-regulation and security. Together, we will all get curious about the heart behind the behavior.

Parenting through these times is hard, and knowing how best to help your child/teen navigate life challenges can sometimes feel stressful and overwhelming. I work with children and caregivers alike to learn new ways of responding and supporting one another as they navigate different developmental stages, stressors, changes, or transitions.

It’s painful to see your child hurting or feeling lost, especially if you are unsure how to help them in that moment. I can guide you as a parent to bridge any gaps between you, offer effective tools and skills, and reassure your child they are valued, loved and important. As parents, we want our ceiling to be the floor for our children.

Therapy for Parents

I particularly value working with parents to explore the ways their own attachment history and family of origin experiences influence their current parenting strategies and family dynamics. I enjoy helping parents identify and have compassion toward the wounded parts of themselves that show up or are activated when they witness their own child struggle.

Our internal maps for parenting are powerful reflections of the kind of parenting we experienced, and we can often find ourselves playing out these same patterns even if we are aware of their limitations.

Parenting is a space in which you may feel particularly vulnerable or uncertain and I want to offer reassurance that my role is to highlight and capitalize on your strengths, explore your own wounds and/or maps for connection, expand your skills and confidence, and support any needs for healing in a way that feels validating, nurturing, and safe.

I recognize that each parent or caregiver has unique family experiences, strengths, needs, and goals. I work with parents to engage in reflection and increased alignment with each other to find parenting strategies that work for everyone. I collaborate with blended families and multigenerational families to discover the ways in which they can nurture a shared parenting style and family culture that makes sense for everyone.

My Background

I hold a Master’s Degree in Marriage and Family Therapy from Amberton University, along with a Bachelor’s of Science in Human Development of Family Science from The University of North Texas.

I have experience working in private practice and the school system, working with couples, families, and adult individuals. I am passionate about working with relationships, knowing the power they hold for our wellbeing, personhood, and sense of security in the world.

I identify as an LGBTQIA+ ally, sex-positive, and culturally humble therapist.