It’s Britta.
I care about seeing the individual and the whole.
I’m a psychotherapist and HR consultant whose work is shaped by lived experience, professional expertise, and a deep curiosity about how we become who we are.
As the seventh of ten children in a multicultural family, I learned early about identity, belonging, and relationships. I was often mistaken for a sister I resembled and found myself repeating, “It’s Britta.” Being seen as yourself mattered. It still does, and that understanding continues to inform my work.
It’s work.
It’s worth.
Sometimes,
they get tangled.
I started working at 13. By 20, I had accumulated roughly 10,000 hours of work experience. Looking back, work was my first addiction. It gave me purpose, structure, and a way to feel seen and valued. It also offered a distraction from struggles at school with bullying and dyslexia and the complicated mix of chaos and connection at home.
The rewards were clear: work harder, get better shifts, earn more money, receive a promotion. I learned how to work. It took longer to understand what work was doing for me.
When it was time for college, I studied business and organizational behavior at Boston University. My family had already given me plenty of material: group dynamics, uneven workloads, competing needs, and questionable accountability around the job chart.
I’ve never believed that work is family. You can leave a job or be fired from one; family relationships are more complicated. Although I would have welcomed the opportunity to give my brothers a 360 review on their teamwork and the chores that somehow became their sisters’ responsibility.
“Work became my socially acceptable compulsion.”
— Britta Larsen, Donna Karan Sent Me to Therapy
It’s creativity.
It’s systems.
It’s people.
Fashion helped me express myself. Business helped me make sense of systems. After graduating from Boston University in 1997, I moved to NYC and began a career that would take me through fashion, advertising, branding, innovation, strategy, wellness, and e-commerce.
The common thread was working. A lot. Sometimes too much.
I turned 50 in 2026, having worked for 37 years. That’s decades of learning how big ideas become everyday work, navigating complicated people dynamics, and understanding the pressure of leadership. I’ve always understood creativity and spreadsheets and cared about the people behind both.
I never worked for the company.
I worked for the people and culture.
The people who founded it. The people who helped build it. The people whose everyday lives were shaped by working there.
“That felt like HR therapy.”
For years, founders, leaders, and employees left conversations with me saying those words. We might have started with a performance review, a difficult colleague, or a career decision. Often, we ended up talking about worth, boundaries, belonging, or the fear of not being enough.
Those conversations, alongside my own experience in therapy, made me want to understand more and become better equipped to help. In 2023, I began graduate school at Northwestern University, where I earned my master’s in Clinical Mental Health Counseling in 2025. My studies emphasized multiculturalism and social justice, and my thesis explored the distinction between executive coaching and executive therapy.
Today, I work with founders, executives, leaders, individuals, and couples as a psychotherapist while continuing to support organizations through HR consulting. Let’s connect.
We keep becoming. Preferably with support, perspective, and a little humor.
Explore my forthcoming book, You’re Doing It: Stages of Becoming, where personal stories meet psychoeducation to explore how we become who we are and how that shapes the way we live, relate, and lead.