Space Between Counseling Services - Susan Stork, CST

12/07/2025

A little PSA and a little life update 🫧🧪🥚

Right before my sons surgery, I did something for my own health.

For months my perimenopause symptoms were not lining up, and every time I asked for support I ended up in routine tests with normal results, stacked referrals, and long waitlists. My primary care doctor retired in July, my OBGYN is always beyond capacity, and I felt myself slipping through the cracks.

I am a business owner, a therapist, a mom sitting bedside after a major surgery, a partner to a man who flies for a living, and a human who holds a lot of people every week. I did not have the capacity for that maze.

So I trusted myself.
I went to for a full MRI and bloodwork because my body was nudging me. Not loudly, but clearly enough that I could not ignore it. 🫀✨


That decision HAS changed my life.

The imaging and labs found a small 🍉 mass on my left o***y. Right now the possibilities range between stage 1 and stage 3 🤯

🍀🧧🤞There is still a 33 percent chance it is benign, but the indicators are not pointing that way.

At 46, I am NOW reconsidering A LOT.

And this is why I have been MIA for the past month.

If you are following along, please expect some delays, a lack of availability, and different scheduling - as I move toward surgery, coping, living, dealing, recovery, and existential processing.

Thank you for your grace. 🤍

🚨 If you are in perimenopause or navigating hormone shifts, please research your symptoms.

If something feels off, not catastrophic just different, advocate for yourself.

Do not assume it is just hormones.

⏰ Your time is never refundable.
🗣️ Your body is speaking.
👂 Listen early and listen often.

Adulting Sucks ✅
SMS

⬆️⬆️⬆️
📷 A month inside my new normal — and my best attempt at coping with my humans + my animal roommates — in the midst of it all. 🤷🏼‍♀️

11/25/2025

Partnership built on shared principles becomes its own shelter. Choosing each other on purpose, over and over, even when the world tilts.

In a secure relationship, you are not out there alone.
You protect each other.
You rely on each other.
You create safety that the outside world cannot guarantee.

It becomes the place you return to.
The place that steadies you.
The place that remembers who you are when everything else feels unstable.

A small sanctuary, built by two (or more) humans who keep choosing to stand together.

We live in a dangerous, indifferent, sometimes hostile, and unpredictable world. When the chips are down, people tend to scramble and take care of themselves.

This is why secure-functioning relationships are so important. Together, partners can create a shelter from the slings and arrows of life. They can protect one another, rely on one another, and ensure each other's safety.

11/13/2025

A week in the ICU teaches you a lot:

The rise and fall of a number that dictates the mood of the room.

You stop watching the clock.
You start watching the monitor.

is delicate.
When it is aligned, it feels like a small miracle.
When one person breaks rhythm, the whole unit shifts.

And then there is the teamwork of a couple together 24+ years.

A practiced choreography built through decades of airports, arguments, celebrations, disappointments, and growing up side by side.

One of you watches the monitor.
One of you listens to the nurse.
One of you gathers the details.
One of you catches the things nobody said out loud.

You trade roles without discussion because this is what long term partnership is:
💃a quiet, instinctive duet under impossible lighting.🕺🏼

🗣️Communication bends.
A message whispered through five professionals returns altered. Parents end up carrying the original meaning like contraband.

Power moves in the pauses.
A clipped tone.
A slow response.
A decision made without eye contact.
You feel the hierarchy before you understand it. 🩻🩺🥼

The feminine burden remains, even in parenthood.
Not mothering, but the archetype.
The scanning.
The emotional labor.
The intuitive knowing.
The unseen work of anticipating the shift before the alarm sounds.

becomes a kind of quiet clairvoyance.

And the gap between professionals and modern teens is wide.

Many professionals have no idea how teens show up today.
The sarcasm that is actually fear.
The resignation that looks like defiance.
The digital humor as coping.
The burnout that mimics attitude.
Teens live in a different emotional language, and most adults are not bilingual.

By the end of the week, you realize parenthood is its own career.

It is selfless work.
It is work.
It is the art of staying steady inside confusion.
It is learning the quiet truths that make us human.

** Glad to be home again as a family crew of 3 🧑‍🧑‍🧒 - we have appreciated your care up close and far away 🫶🏼

11/09/2025

Our family has been in the ICU since our son’s spinal fusion surgery last week. The procedure was successful, but his recovery has required more time and monitoring than we expected. What was supposed to be one night in the ICU has turned into many, as his body and heart find their own pace for healing.

As a parent, there is no training for witnessing your child in deep pain. You learn to breathe differently, to track monitors, to celebrate small signs of strength… a moment of rest, a small appetite, a stable number on a screen.

We are grateful for an extraordinary medical team at MedStar Union Memorial, especially Dr. Zan Naseer and the ICU staff who have carried us through.

To my SBCS community: thank you for your patience, care, and understanding as schedules {may need} to shift and I respond more slowly than usual.

Every message of love has reached us, and we feel it deeply ❤️🫂.

Holding faith in the body’s wisdom, the nervous system’s resilience, and the slow work of repair.

One day, at a time.

❤️‍🩹🔩🫂
SMS

11/06/2025

PSA from a Relationship Therapist
on Parenting in Hard Times 🕯️

We have been together twenty-four years.
We have walked through every kind of room…
living rooms full of love and heartbreak,
airports where we learned how to let go,
NICUs where we learned how to breathe through uncertainty,
and now this one.

Hospital light.
Fluorescent buzzing.
Waiting.

In we talk about - but life teaches it.
Longevity is not a fairy tale.

It is a kind of work ⚠️
You return.
You sit in silence.
You learn the language of waiting.

is a sequence of rooms you keep entering together.

Some filled with laughter.
Some with grief.
Some so bright they show every crack in the paint.

If you are in a hard season, remember this…
is not built only in the soft spaces.

It is built here too, in the fluorescent rooms that test your patience and your tolerance, in the quiet discipline of staying present, as you wait with your heart ❤️ living outside your own chest.

🧑‍🧑‍🧒🫂🫶🏼🧗
SMS

10/30/2025

🖤✨ Bringing out the big guns this week ✨🖤

Some of you remember The Witches of Eastwick (1987) — three women conjuring what they thought they wanted, only to realize the darkness they called in was just their own unhealed reflection.

That is avoidant attachment in 2025 form.
Voodoo made digital.
A spell we keep casting on ourselves.

Here is the truth, backed by research.

Avoidant types often grew up in emotional droughts, praised for independence and punished for need. They learn to equate closeness with danger.

Their nervous systems flare at intimacy, so they pull away, criticize, ghost, or shut down. Not because they do not care, but because closeness feels like annihilation.

But here is where it turns cruel.

When self hatred sits at the center, avoidance morphs into contempt. Projection becomes protection.

Hurt people hurt people.

Sometimes beautifully dressed. Sometimes fluent in therapy language. Still terrified of being seen.

This week I am calling it what it is.
Not demonic possession. Not bad luck.
Just generations of people who learned that love was unsafe and are now reenacting that spell again and again.

So yes, I am bringing out the big guns.
Salt. Boundaries. Compassion. Shadow work.
And a deep reminder that what you reject in others is often what you cannot yet hold in yourself.

🕯️The work is sacred.
🪄The spell is awareness.
💀The antidote is love.

Stay safe out there 🖤
SMS

10/26/2025

🛋️ Community Resource for Marylanders - seeking a new therapist for 12+ folks ⭐️

🌿 New Therapist Alert 🌿

Please help me welcome Eviva (pronounced Eh-vee-vah) to Space Between Counseling Services!

Eviva is currently being trained and supervised by our Lead Clinician — Abby Smith, LCPC, CST, an AASECT Certified S*x Therapist and an all-around powerhouse.

Eviva is an ideal fit for clients who are:

✨ Integrating activism and identity into their healing journey
✨ Navigating developmental life transitions
✨ Breaking family cycles and seeking a new way forward

We are so grateful to have her join the SBCS community — Eviva brings curiosity, heart, and a grounded energy that aligns with our deeper SBCS mission.

Welcome, Eviva 💫

🪩⬇️ More about Eviva:

https://www.spacebetweencounselingservices.com/work-with-eviva

https://www.instagram.com/stories/betwixt_to_bardo/3751944937558556400?utm_source=ig_story_item_share&igsh=MXE3cHU4dDg3ZDRoeg==

10/25/2025

🪆 Navigating Emotional Turbulence: Hazards of Modern Psychotherapy 👇🏼

As I reflect on my week, I'm reminded of the emotional challenges of being a therapist.
From intense sessions to holding space for the full spectrum of human emotions, the emotional and energetic hazards are real.

This is what it means to absorb pain, experience empathic overload, and navigate boundary erosion.

If you resonate with this, please share your experiences in the comments. 👇🏼

10/17/2025

The More Rooms You Walk Through 🚪

The more Y O U - you are in every room 👉🏼
your bedroom, your office, the boardroom, the waiting room, the jail cell, the yoga studio, the sanctuary …
the less split you become ✨

Every time you fragment yourself to belong, your psyche keeps the receipt 🧾

Wholeness asks for all of you …
even the parts you learned to hide 🖤

Carl Jung wrote,

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

And Toni Wolff reminded us that the many selves within are meant to coexist, not compete 🌙

Your inner Mother, Amazon, Hetaira, and Medial Woman each deserve a seat at the table 🍽️

To integrate them is to remember yourself again and again in every room you enter 🪞

🫶🏼🖤👩🏼‍🦳
SMS