Therapy Group of DC
Dr. Manon Pesme, Psy.D.
Understanding yourself more deeply — and trusting what you find
About Dr. Pesme
Most people arrive in therapy able to describe what’s wrong but not why it keeps happening. You know the shape of the pattern — the same argument, the same withdrawal, the same flatness that settles in around month three of everything. What’s harder to see is what the pattern is doing for you, and what it cost you to learn it in the first place. That’s the part I’m most interested in.
I work psychodynamically, which means I’m less focused on giving you techniques and more focused on helping you understand yourself — how you got here, what you’re protecting, and what becomes possible once you can see it clearly.
“I hope you can approach your emotions and patterns with curiosity and compassion, feel more connected to yourself, and live more authentically.”
Dr. Manon Pesme, Psy.D., Psychology Associate, Therapist DC
My Approach
I approach the beginning of therapy with curiosity. I want to know what brought you in, but I also want to know what your life has been like, who raised you and how, and what you learned early on about what was safe to feel and say. Those things tend to be more connected than they first appear.
Much of my training has been in what goes unspoken in a room — the defenses we develop, the things we communicate without meaning to, the ways we relate to a therapist that echo how we’ve related to everyone else. I’ll pay attention to what happens between us, and sometimes I’ll name it.
I’m warm, and I’ll also gently push where it seems useful. The places we tend to steer around are often where something important is sitting. If something I say doesn’t land, I want to hear about it — that conversation is frequently the work itself.
Interested in working with Dr. Manon Pesme?
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Identity, Culture & Difference
Questions about race, culture, and identity aren’t a side conversation in my office — they’re often central. Who you are shapes how you move through the world, what you’ve had to explain or defend, what you’ve been able to take for granted and what you haven’t. I want to make room for all of that rather than treat it as background.
I’ve worked with people carrying grief that never got acknowledged, and with people whose sense of themselves has been shaped by being read a particular way by others. I see clients in English and French.
Depression, Trauma & Grief
Depression often looks like nothing from the outside. You’re functioning, meeting obligations, and something underneath has gone quiet or heavy in a way that’s hard to name. I don’t think that gets solved by pushing harder. It usually needs to be understood first.
I also work with trauma and with loss — including losses that never got much room, or that arrived tangled up with something complicated. My research has focused on how people make meaning after traumatic loss, and that question sits close to how I work: not moving past what happened, but building an understanding of it you can actually live with.
Educational Background
Common Questions
We’ll spend it getting to know each other. I’ll ask what brought you in now — not just what’s wrong, but why this moment — and I’ll want to hear something about your life beyond the problem: your relationships, your history, what things were like growing up. You don’t have to have it organized. Part of what I’m listening for is how you tell it, which often says as much as the content does.
It’s therapy focused on understanding rather than technique. Instead of handing you a set of strategies, we look at the patterns running underneath the problem — where they came from, what purpose they served, and why they persist even when they’ve stopped helping. That includes paying attention to what happens between us in the room, since the way you relate to me will often echo how you relate to people outside it. It tends to be less structured than something like CBT, and the changes it produces tend to hold.
Yes, and I’d rather it be explicit than assumed. For a lot of people these questions are woven into what brought them to therapy — how you’re perceived, what you’ve had to translate or justify, what parts of yourself you set down in certain rooms. I don’t treat that as context around the real issue. It’s frequently central to it.
Yes. Both are areas I’ve focused on clinically and in research. With trauma I move at the pace you set — there’s no benefit to going faster than you can tolerate, and I’d rather build enough safety that the work holds. With grief I’m particularly interested in losses that didn’t get room to be mourned: losses others minimized, or ones that came with complications that made them hard to talk about.
Yes — I see clients 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 Dr. Manon Pesme 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.