My Approach
I believe that the painful places inside you have the power to transform into the strength, hope, and capacity to lead a more fulfilling life. In partnership, we can support you in a path of reconnecting with your own resources, finding sources of resiliency, and tapping into your deepest core longings and mind/body messages, so that you can move through what has been frustrating, painful and difficult in your life and relationships and begin to live the kind of life you want.
As we work together, I will support you in attending to what shows up below conscious awareness so that you have greater ability to make sense of what is happening relationally and physiologically in connection with your thoughts and feelings. We can often take advantage of natural healing mechanisms to support the physiological impacts of trauma and betrayal. You’ll also find that I will support you to become more skilled at developing awareness, and hence capacity, with what is most important for you to work through in your internal world. I am gentle and, when appropriate, will challenge you to grow. Recognizing the real challenges, injustices and complexities we contend in work, home and in political systems, I find it a great honor to support you in the journey of empowerment. I work in a collaborative relationship that seeks to honor the whole of you and your choices, with sensitivity to the impact of social and cultural injustice.
MY THEORETICAL APPROACH
While the core of psychotherapy involves some basic understandings of how people interact, and a licensed therapist has undergone a period of internship and supervision, therapists differ according to the amounts of training they continue to receive and their theoretical perspectives.
My own journey to continually learn and grow, as well as my background in mental health working with the Feldenkrais Method(R), a mind body system based on neuroscience, has led me to continually seek the most effective therapies that work with the mind body relationship and address the relationship between trauma, somatic symptoms, cultural issues and relationships.
My approach is a blend of somatic, attachment-focused and relational analytic based on extensive training and thinking of how these systems work together to support you. In detail, somatic psychotherapies refer to therapies that involve the mind and body. Attachment refers to the bonding that happens between children and a primary caregiver, or in adult relationships, and our styles of finding love intimacy and security. Relational analytic means looking at the those relationship dynamics in relation to past and present patterns.
For the last decade I’ve studied somatic psychotherapies including Sensorimotor Psychotherapy(R), Psychophysical Therapy(R), Inner Relationship Focusing(R) and many other approaches.
As an integrative therapist, my current training is in Intensive Short Term Dynamic Psychotherapy a form of body oriented, active psychoanalytic therapy, that seeks to support you in working out unconscious issues and feelings that develop intergenerationally or through early attachments, in the most effective way possible. It provides a roadmap to understanding the pathways between emotional patterns, anxiety and physical symptoms in the body. It involves active collaboration between you the client and me the therapist to work together in understanding and facing core emotional challenge. It is an empowerment based approach to work through emotional blocks to lead a life that is fully honoring of your emotional truth.
Sessions in ISTDP are (optional to you) videotaped. Research has shown that training through video tape review leads to improved effectiveness and psychotherapy, and the ability for a therapist to develop skills in the moment to moment emotional developments of the therapy. If you consent, I may review videotape of sessions or engage in ongoing consultation to continually support my learning and skill.
Individual Therapy
I offer ISTDP sessions, when desired, in an intensive format, involving