Tobi Brenner, LPC, NCC

I help women untangle the anxiety, perfectionism, and people-pleasing that often have roots far deeper than they realize, including the painful legacy of growing up with an emotionally unavailable, critical, or controlling mother. If you've spent your life carrying the weight of everyone else's expectations, I can help you set it down and build something that finally feels like yours.

Hi, I'm Tobi Brenner, Licensed Professional Counselor and founder of EmpowHer Counseling. If you've spent your whole life feeling like you're never quite enough, no matter how hard you try, how much you achieve, or how carefully you manage everyone else's feelings, you're in the right place.

Many of the women I work with are high-achieving, deeply responsible, and perpetually exhausted. They've mastered looking like they have it together while quietly feeling anxious, disconnected, resentful, or stuck. And for a lot of them, those patterns didn't start at work or in their adult relationships. They started in childhood... shaped by a mother who was critical, emotionally unpredictable, dismissive, or impossible to please.

Growing up in that kind of environment teaches girls early that love is conditional, that their needs don't matter, and that the only way to stay safe is to be perfect, agreeable, and invisible. As adults, those lessons show up as relentless self-criticism, chronic anxiety, difficulty saying no, and a deep, nagging sense that you're somehow failing at your own life. These aren't personality flaws — they're survival strategies rooted in real trauma. It doesn't always look the way people expect trauma to look, but the impact is real, the patterns make sense, and healing is possible.

Before becoming a therapist, I spent more than 20 years in corporate consulting, business operations, and human resources. I've sat in the boardrooms, managed the impossible expectations, and navigated the pressure to perform, all while keeping it together on the outside. That background deeply informs the work I do with career-focused, high-achieving women who are tired of succeeding at everything except feeling okay.

My approach is warm, direct, and occasionally sprinkled with humor and some honest (and sometimes salty 😉) language. I use evidence-based methods including Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), mindfulness, and strength-based techniques, woven with trauma-informed care. Together, we'll work on quieting your inner critic, setting boundaries without the guilt spiral, managing anxiety, rebuilding your sense of self, and figuring out what you actually want, perhaps for the first time.

I also provide sex therapy for women navigating intimacy, desire, body image, or sexuality concerns in a safe, non-judgmental space.

Whether you're dealing with anxiety, a major life transition, grief, relationship struggles, career burnout, body image, LGBTQ+ identity, or just that persistent feeling that something needs to change, lets talk.

Therapy might just be the place where you finally stop performing and start becoming.

I offer a free initial consultation. Reach out... you don't have to keep carrying this alone.