Therapy Group of DC
Ela Perra
The patterns you learned early, and how to change them
About Ela Perra
If your anxiety arrives before you understand what it’s about — and if some part of you has already decided that whatever you’re feeling is too much, or wrong, or best kept to yourself — I want to slow that down with you. Much of my work is with people who have gotten very good at managing their feelings and very out of practice at having them.
I’m less interested in getting rid of a symptom quickly than in understanding what it’s doing for you. Anxiety usually makes sense once you know what it’s protecting, and it tends to loosen on its own once the feelings underneath it have somewhere to go.
“My hope is that each client feels free to live with greater authenticity, spontaneity, and joy, no longer limited by patterns shaped by past experiences.”
Ela Perra, Psychology Associate, CTA, Therapist DC
My Approach
My primary training is in transactional analysis, which is a way of paying attention to the different voices you carry: the critical one that learned to shut things down, the younger one that learned to go quiet to keep the peace, and the grounded adult one that can look at what’s actually happening right now. A lot of what feels like anxiety is those voices arguing. This is work I’ve trained in formally: I’m a Certified Transactional Analyst through the European Association for Transactional Analysis (EATA).
I also work experientially. I’ll ask you to describe things in the present tense rather than about the past, to notice what’s happening in your body while you speak, and sometimes to say the thing out loud in the room that you’ve never said to the person it belongs to. I taught acting for many years alongside my clinical work, and I’ve never lost my conviction that some things have to be spoken and felt rather than analyzed.
I hope you’ll find me both warm and direct. I won’t rush to take your symptoms away before we understand them together, and I won’t treat you as fragile. I have real respect for what you’re able to carry.
Interested in working with Ela Perra?
Take the first step — we’ll help you get started.
Working With Couples
I see couples as well as individuals, and the through-line is the same: most of what goes wrong between two people isn’t the feeling itself but what happens to it. Someone feels hurt, or jealous, or unappreciated, and instead of saying so they go quiet. The silence does more damage than the feeling would have. I help couples interrupt that cycle while it’s happening, so you can say the difficult thing to each other rather than about each other.
I work with communication breakdowns, recurring conflict, and differences over parenting. Some couples also carry an added weight: two demanding careers, two cultures, family an ocean away.
Living Between Countries
I trained as a psychotherapist in Rome and practiced there for two decades before coming to Washington. I see clients in English, Italian, and Portuguese, and I’ve spent much of my career with people building lives outside the country they came from.
There’s a particular kind of tiredness in that — being fluent but not quite at home, holding a version of yourself that made sense somewhere else and doesn’t fully translate here, managing family obligations across a time zone, explaining yourself constantly. It’s easy to treat all of that as a logistical problem you should have solved by now. It isn’t one, and it deserves real care and attention.
If you’re someone who has been the capable one for a long time, and you’re tired, and you’d like to find out what you actually feel underneath all that competence — I’m here for that work.
Educational Background
Common Questions
We’ll start by getting clear together on what you want from this. Not a formal goal, but an honest one. I’ll want to hear about a recent moment when the anxiety showed up, described in as much detail as you can manage, in the present tense. It may sound like a small thing, but it rarely is: describing something as it happens, rather than summarizing it from a distance, is often the first time people notice what’s actually going on inside them.
Transactional analysis is a form of psychotherapy that maps the distinct inner voices we all carry (in its language, the Parent, Adult, and Child ego states) and how they drive our feelings, decisions, and relationships. Most of us have an internal critic that formed early, a younger part that learned certain feelings were unsafe, and an adult who can assess reality clearly but gets crowded out under stress. In our sessions, we’ll learn to tell those apart in real time. Once you can hear the critic as a voice rather than as the truth, you have a choice you didn’t have before. It’s practical work, and it goes deep.
Yes, and it’s some of my favorite work. I trained and practiced in Rome for twenty years before I moved here, and I work in English, Italian, and Portuguese. That matters more than people expect: feelings tend to live in a first language even when daily life runs in a second, and the work changes when therapy can happen in whichever one holds the feeling. I’ve also made this kind of move myself, so you can skip the part where you justify why a good life on paper still feels hard. You won’t need to convince me that it does.
Communication that has stopped working, conflict that keeps circling back to the same place, parenting differences, and the strain of balancing two careers or two sets of cultural expectations. Whatever brings you in, I pay close attention to what happens between you as we talk: who pursues, who retreats, what gets swallowed instead of said. And I’m active about it. I’ll stop a pattern mid-sentence rather than describe it afterward.
Yes. I see clients both in person at our Dupont Circle office and by secure video anywhere in DC.
Ready — or still deciding?
Either way, we’ll make it easy. Get started with Ela Perra directly, or tell us what you’re looking for and we’ll connect you with the right therapist. Takes a few minutes — no commitment.
Transparent Pricing & Insurance Support
Life in DC can be complicated. Insurance paperwork shouldn’t be. We handle the paperwork to make reimbursement simple.