When we work together, we are equals in relationship. I may have therapeutic training, but I am just another human being. You are, therefore, the expert of your own life experience, and I am both a witness and a guide in our relationship.
Neuroscience informs us that the psyche is always pushing toward the integration of experience. So even when we become submerged in traumatic stress, our minds are working with us, rather than against us. We can trust the psyche's process throughout the healing work that we do.
Humans are not broken, and as a therapist, my job is never to fix another person. Fixing isn't possible for a reason, and that reason reflects the wholeness of each individual, independent of the trauma experienced. Trauma doesn't break people, but it does challenge them. It's important that we establish this wisdom in our work together.
As an inclusive and affirming therapist, all races, ethnicities, genders, and sexual orientations are welcomed and celebrated in my care. Identity shaming is not tolerated in my life or within my practice.
In recovery, we need to experience processes that were chronically disrupted or disengaged from. Primarily, many survivors haven't had the experience of (or experienced very little of) being genuinely cared for, appreciated, and celebrated. Individuals may have only received care or cheerleading when and if they abided by dysfunctional rules or coercive control by perpetrators. In therapy, I believe it is your right to be authentically honored without performance.
My goal for our work together is to engage with the unconscious mind that holds onto unresolved trauma narratives, beliefs, and patterns. I believe that healing requires the facilitation of helping unconscious material become more conscious to the individual. In our work together, I will strive to help you uncover and release toxic stress that manifests as low self-esteem, inattentiveness, and disease.
While working collaboratively, I integrate therapies to authentically practice in the best way that I see fit per each unique individual and/or relational system, which makes me an integrative trauma therapist. I encourage deep internal reflection and processing that challenges programming and conditioning, attachment ruptures and unmet needs, dysfunctional intimacy and family-of-origin trauma, and complex trauma/dissociative symptoms.
My clients often describe me as being deeply loving, warm, wise, funny, and compassionate. Most importantly, as someone who "really gets it." Rather than pathologizing people, I look at symptoms holistically as they relate to unmet attachment needs.
In treatment, I will spend time getting to know you, and/or yourself and your loved ones who will attend relational counseling. Together, we will determine your specific needs, longings, and pain points, and will work slowly and compassionately towards a future in which you and/or your relationships feel more resilient.
I focus on witnessing my clients by tending to and tracking emotional gestures, physical sensations, unmet needs, and longings. I help people connect to the present, their resources, their bodies, feelings, and needs to find a home within themselves in the presence of relational attunement. I teach people strategies to connect to their authenticity outside of sessions, often involving the practice of re-parenting.
While utilizing EMDR in sessions, I spend a lot of time in the resourcing phase helping clients make contact with their parts, understand their own neurology, and do rescue missions for young parts. This is a necessary process for clients with complex and developmental trauma. In this way, the length of treatment can be longer than some people want for it to while they're originally looking for EMDR sessions.
In my practice, resourcing work is necessary until I understand that the client's neurology has enough capacity for processing traumatic memories, and that this process is what may help them even further (Note: another important point for survivors to know is that processing traumatic memories isn't always necessary for their healing).
Relational counseling for romantic partners works best when each person is committed to viewing the relationally distant/conflicted dynamic as a theme or pattern that needs to be addressed together. When we are living in high volumes of disconnection, it is normal to see our partners as the problem, and this is typically a stuck point. It's okay if this is true in moments for partners, and it is often something we toggle in therapy.
However, long-term, chronic resentment that takes form of emotional abuse is not appropriate for relational counseling. Therapy is not effective for people who are unwilling to take ownership of their own behaviors and who may be causing emotional and psychic harm to their partners.