Specalizations
While I am able to work with a wide arise of mental health concerns, from anxiety to depression there are a couple of areas that I specialize in:
Attachment Therapy
For Adults/Developmental Trauma
Often individuals come to see me because they feel like their lives are lacking in acceptance and understanding. They may see these qualities as simply absent from their internal lives, or within their relationships, or a mixture of these two. Often when these qualities are lacking we move in:
-Perfectionism
-Codependency
-Historical Trauma
-Inner Child Wounding
-Insecure Attachment
Trauma
On a simple level, the experience of trauma comes down to the statement of "too much, too fast". However while this sounds simple on the page, the experience of trauma is anything but. From relational distress to more intense emotional experiences, the results of trauma can be long-lasting. I work with the following forms of trauma:
-Developmental Trauma
-PTSD
-Complex PTSD
-Family Trauma
-Sexual Trauma
religious trauma
While I have a lot of experience working with trauma, and am able to address trauma that may be coming from a variety of areas, I specialize in working with trauma surrounding religion. This may be religious trauma that came from growing up a home environment where they didn’t believe the religious messages they were being taught, or shame that results from religion, or simply feeling like something is “off” or “stuck” as it relates to the core of their identity.
BurnOut
Coming from a pandemic and the ongoing stressors of living in our modern world, burnout continues to be a challenge for many professionals. This challenge doesn't just impact us on a mental level, but a physical and emotional level as well. I'll work with you to address the core concerns of how burnout shows up in your life and work with you to make a holistic recovery plan.
Approach
Here are some of the tools I use....
EMDR
EMDR, specifically attachment-focused EMDR works with clients in a process called memory reconsolidation. This process starts first with us building inner resources and then has us go into the memories that might be influencing or shaping our lives currently. Because I use this from an attachment focus, great attention is applied to the therapeutic relationship, as well as working slowly to understand your internal experience.
IFS
Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a type of therapy that helps individuals better understand and work with their internal experiences, such as thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. The basic premise of IFS is that everyone has different parts within them, each with their own feelings, motivations, and behaviors. For example, someone might have an "angry part" or a "pleaser part" that comes out in certain situations.
In IFS therapy, the therapist helps the client to identify and understand these different parts, and to develop a greater sense of compassion and curiosity towards them. Rather than trying to suppress or eliminate these parts, IFS seeks to help individuals find balance and harmony between them.
This framework allows us to deepen our understanding of how the mind, the relationships around us, and our internal world influenced our inner felt experience and through this sense of organization helps us experience greater coherence, efficiency, and collaboration with others.
Somatic Experiencing
This model of trauma resolution and nervous system regulation works directly with the client’s central nervous system. Through life stress, trauma, the pace of our modern society, and a host of other factors client’s come to this modality with the hope of repatterning their nervous system. Over our life span, we encounter many situations that challenge our bodies to survive threats. What we learn from each experience becomes our blueprint for future self-projection and protection. Healing accelerates when energy trapped in the nervous system has an opportunity to discharge, renegotiate, and reorganize its locked-in fight, flight, and freeze responses that have remained in the body after the original traumatic incidents occurred. Somatic Experiencing frees us to live in the present, bringing our bodies up to date, and also promotes the lost capacity to self-regulate, and the ability to spontaneously move from activation to relaxation