I Know What It Costs To Be "Easy To Be Around"
Marina Callozzo, LCSW, CCTP-II
You've probably gotten good at reading a room and making yourself smaller in it. I know something about that cost myself. I'm a trauma survivor too, which is part of why I don't practice the way I was taught to. But this isn't about my story. It's about what happens when you stop shrinking in yours.
Therapy Wasn't Built For Most Of Us
For over a hundred years, therapy has run on a model built by and for a very narrow kind of person—mostly straight, mostly white, mostly willing to shrink to fit whatever "normal" was supposed to mean that decade. A lot of us don't fit that, and a lot of therapists are done pretending the model still works as-is. I'm one of the therapists doing this differently: decolonizing the framework instead of colonizing you into it. My politics and my clinical work aren't separate things. The belief that no one should have to make themselves smaller to be acceptable is the whole reason I practice this way.
How I Work
I use EMDR (trained, not certified) alongside trauma-informed talk therapy, built around a decolonizing framework—meaning we question the assumptions traditional therapy makes about what's "normal," whose experience counts, and who gets to take up space. This isn't about managing your symptoms into something more convenient for other people. It's about long-term work on the trauma underneath the anxiety, the depression, the inability to say no, or the situations you've tolerated because they were familiar.
The Specifics
Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW), trained in EMDR, trauma specialist. Telehealth only, licensed in Illinois and Maine, with California coming soon. Private pay, with superbills available upon request.
Who I Am In This Work?
I'm gender-queer and kink-friendly myself, not as a footnote but because it shapes how I show up in the room. I don't wear a mask in session, and I'm not going to ask you to wear one either.
What I Believe
There's no such thing as too much. There's no such thing as extra. Those are words other people used to make you smaller so they can be more comfortable, and I don't build therapy around other people's comfort. My politics aren't separate from my clinical work—they're the reason I do it this way. If you've been afraid that the loudest, most "too much" version of yourself is who you really are, I’d like to meet you.