I work with leaders, organizations, and care-centered systems navigating burnout, invisible labor, and capacity strain bringing a clinical, feminist, and somatic lens to how work is designed and sustained.
This work is grounded, ethical, and practical.
It’s about aligning work with real human capacity.
Designing Capacity
Where Care and Culture Meet
Work with me
Psychotherapy
If you’re responsible for people and the current models are asking too much, you’re not imagining it.
Many systems are operating under cultural assumptions that:
individualize structural strain
reward over-functioning
misread exhaustion as a resilience issue
My work helps slow this down and make the underlying patterns visible, so change is possible without asking people to override their bodies or lives.
Who This is For
I primarily work with:
healthcare and maternal health systems
nonprofit and mission-driven organizations
women leaders and decision-makers
teams navigating growth, change, or chronic overload
Especially in spaces where care, responsibility, and invisible labor intersect.
How I Approach This Work
I don’t motivate or offer one-size solutions.
I help systems:
see the conditions they are reproducing
understand how nervous system strain shapes culture and decision-making
design structures that align work with real human capacity
My background as a psychotherapist informs everything I do grounding strategy in ethics, embodiment, and lived complexity.
Pathways
There are a few distinct ways to engage my work:
Consulting, speaking, and advisory work with organizations and leaders.
A postpartum support tool designed for new mothers and the providers who support them, used in healthcare and community systems.
Individual psychotherapy, offered in a clearly bounded clinical setting.
Healing is Strategy. Business is Personal.
Elizabeth O’Brien, LPC
This is therapy. This is consulting. This is your Shift.
I’m Elizabeth—a psychotherapist, consultant, and founder of The Shift Shop.
My work sits at the intersection of nervous system science, feminist business design, and systems-level care. I bring over three decades of experience working with women, families, leaders, and organizations navigating trauma, transition, and change. I believe business, healthcare, and leadership are cultural practices and that how we design them matters.
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Reimagining Business as a Practice of Care and Cultural Change
At The Shift Shop, feminist business design is the framework guiding how we work, lead, and grow. It begins with the radical belief that business can be a space of repair — a place where empathy, equity, and imagination shape every decision.
We integrate the intelligence of the body, the interdependence of living systems, and the wisdom of community into business strategy. This approach moves beyond traditional, extractive models of success toward ones rooted in regeneration, reciprocity, and collective well-being.
Here, success is measured not just in output, but in alignment — in how our work sustains people, purpose, and the planet. Feminist business design invites us to institutionalize empathy, build structures that hold emotional truth, and design enterprises where everyone can flourish.
