From Survival Mode to Self-Trust: The Volare Journey

Volare means “to fly” in Italian. I chose that name because for most of my life, I did not feel like I was flying. I felt like I was surviving — getting through each day, managing other people’s expectations, performing wellness while feeling exhausted underneath. This is the story of how that survival mode became the seed for something I never expected: a platform designed to help others find the freedom I was searching for.

The Counselor Who Needed Counseling

I became a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist because I understood pain. Not from textbooks — from experience. I grew up in a household where emotions were inconvenient, where you learned to read the room before you entered it, and where the phrase “you’re too sensitive” was delivered like a diagnosis.

Therapy school taught me the theory. But it was my own therapy — years of it — that taught me the reality: healing is not linear, it is not pretty, and it absolutely cannot be done alone. The irony of being a counselor who privately struggled with the same things her clients brought into session was not lost on me. But instead of shaming myself for it, I eventually learned to see it as my greatest asset.

The Insurance Burnout

For several years, I ran a traditional insurance-based practice. I saw 28 clients a week, fought with insurance companies for authorizations, and spent my evenings writing notes that served the payer more than the patient. I was helping people — I know I was — but I was also slowly disappearing. The model was designed for volume, not depth. And depth was what I believed in.

The breaking point came during a particularly difficult week when I realized I was giving my clients advice I was not following myself: “Set boundaries. Prioritize your needs. You cannot pour from an empty cup.” I was an empty cup handing out water.

The Vision for Volare

The idea for Volare did not arrive as a business plan. It arrived as a feeling — a conviction that there had to be a better way to do this work. A way that honored the practitioner’s humanity as much as the client’s. A way that used the power of community, not just the one-on-one hour. A way that was accessible, warm, and grounded in real clinical science.

I started with a question: What if therapy could feel less like a clinical appointment and more like coming home? Not home as in comfortable and familiar — because growth is rarely comfortable. But home as in safe. A place where you belong. A place where you can take off the armor and still be held.

Building the Platform

Volare started as a single group therapy program for women navigating life transitions — career changes, relationship endings, identity shifts. Eight women. Six weeks. A rented room with too many chairs and not enough tissues. What happened in that room exceeded every clinical expectation I had.

The women who joined were not in crisis. They were functional, successful, and deeply tired of performing. In the safety of the group, they began to tell the truth — about their marriages, their mothers, their fears, their desires. And as they told the truth, they began to change. Not because I gave them tools (though I did), but because they witnessed each other’s courage and it gave them permission to find their own.

What Volare Is Today

Today, Volare is a multi-faceted therapeutic platform offering group therapy programs, one-on-one coaching, free webinars, and a clinician mentorship track for practitioners who want to build cash-pay practices centered on group work. We serve clients across California and are expanding our virtual offerings nationally.

But at its core, Volare is still that rented room with the too-many chairs. It is still the belief that people heal in connection. It is still the conviction that you can stay with yourself — your whole, imperfect, complicated self — and still rise.

An Invitation

If you are reading this and something resonates — the exhaustion, the performing, the feeling of being stuck between who you are and who you are pretending to be — consider this your invitation. You do not have to have it all figured out. You do not have to be in crisis. You just have to be willing to show up and tell the truth.

That is where the flight begins.