MEET ROBIN POAGE, LCSW
Hi, I’m Robin. I’m a therapist, and I keep it real.
The warm, slightly funny, refreshingly un-stiff kind of therapy.
I started Turquoise Owl Therapy because I wanted to offer the kind of therapy I’d actually want to experience: real, grounded, and human. I work with empathetic women across Illinois who are ready to feel more connected to themselves and less weighed down by everything around them.
A DIFFERENT WAY TO DO THERAPY
Who I work with
My clients are sensitive, empathetic women, the ones who notice everything, feel it deeply, and have spent a lifetime managing how all of that lands for everyone else. They’re often the reliable one, the calm one, the friend everyone leans on. And they’re quietly exhausted from holding it together.
A lot of them come in over relationships, a friendship that’s changed, family that still gets under their skin, a marriage they’re sorting through. A lot of them are helping professionals themselves. And nearly all of them are carrying some level of anxiety in their body, that hum of being on edge that never quite switches off. If any of that sounds like you, you’re in good company here.
What I believe about this work
You’re not too much, and you’re not broken. Feeling deeply isn’t a flaw to fix, it’s part of how you’re built. So much of what feels like “me being a mess” is really a nervous system that’s been bracing for a long time, doing exactly what it learned to do to keep you safe.
My job isn’t to hand you a worksheet and send you off. It’s to help you understand what your brain and body have been trying to tell you, and to give you real tools to work with them instead of against them. I’ll be honest with you, I’ll challenge you when it helps, and yes, we’ll probably laugh in the middle of some hard sessions. That’s allowed.
How I actually work
You never have to learn any of these names to benefit from them. But if you’re the kind of person who wants to know what’s happening under the hood, here’s the honest rundown. Everything starts with a real relationship and talk therapy, and the rest gets woven in based on what fits you.
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We look at how you learned to connect, and to brace, long before now. Understanding those early patterns takes the shame out of them and makes the way you show up in relationships finally make sense, so you can start choosing differently.
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So much of anxiety, overwhelm, and relationship stress lives in the body, not the thinking mind. I teach practical, body-based tools you can use in real time, so you’re not just understanding what you feel, you’re learning how to work with your nervous system when it starts sounding the alarm.
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This is a go-to of mine. Instead of fighting every anxious or painful thought, we make room for it and get clear on what actually matters to you, then act from there. Less white-knuckling, more living in a way that feels like yours, guided by your values instead of your fear.
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I’m a trained Reiki practitioner, and I think about it in a grounded, physiological way. I can teach you self-Reiki, so you build an ongoing relationship with your own calm. It’s always optional. Reiki helps the nervous system relax and gives your mind and body a genuine chance to rest and reset, the opposite of the high-alert state so many of my clients live in. It can guide you toward that drifting, half-asleep place your mind reaches right before sleep, full of quiet and images, where your system actually gets to downshift.
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For the days when words are hard to find, I offer a couple of low-pressure, client-led ways in. Theme cards with a spiritual lean can be chosen around everyday issues (i.e. confidence, health, body image) as a jumping-off point to explore what’s really going on–spiritual if that speaks to you, simply useful if it doesn’t. Online sand tray lets you build a scene on screen and process it together.
A note on the spiritual side
I’m comfortable making room for the bigger, existential questions if that’s part of how you make sense of your life. There’s space here to explore your inner world, your values, and whatever helps you feel more connected to yourself. We’ll always keep it grounded in what feels healthy, useful, and true to you.
Why “Turquoise Owl”?
The owl is for wisdom, the turquoise is for calm, and together they say the thing I most want for my clients: find your calm wisdom. The name, and the whole feel of this practice, comes from the same place my work does, the belief that steadiness and self-trust are already in you, waiting for the right conditions to come back online.
A few real things about me
Outside the therapy room, I’m happiest outdoors, on a trail, near water, or somewhere new. A lot of what you’ll see around this site are real places I’ve been to, from Illinois forest preserves to trips from Sedona and the Grand Canyon. I’d rather show you the actual, slightly imperfect version of things than a stock photo of a stranger looking serene (okay, there may be at least one of those).
READY WHEN YOU ARE
If this sounds like your kind of therapist, let’s talk.
You don’t have to have it figured out, or arrive calm, or know exactly what you need. You just have to be a little curious. Book a free consult and we’ll see if we’re a fit.