I believe your story is important and worth telling.
When it comes to therapy, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. Your unique life experiences, identity, and history are worth exploring. No matter the therapeutic method I may primarily utilize with you, I approach therapy with an inclusive view and will build upon your innate strengths and special abilities.
I’ve studied many approaches before landing on Narrative Therapy, Somatic Experiencing, Imago Relationship Therapy, and Parts Work Therapy as the primary modalities I utilize with clients.
I am a Certified Trauma Professional and Certified Brainspotting Practitioner (Phase 1, Phase 2, and Expansion). I am passionate about helping my clients heal from trauma and regulate their nervous systems.
As we discuss your situation, we’ll tailor these methods to find an approach that works best for you.
Brainspotting
- Brainspotting is a body-based modality for healing trauma and regulating the nervous system. Brainspotting locates points in a client’s visual field that help access unprocessed trauma in the subcortical brain. The subcortical brain is the most primitive part of the brain and what lights up on a brain scan when the body detects a threat and goes into a stress response of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. By locating the correct eye position (brainspot), you can experience profound healing on a neurobiological level while releasing stress from the body.
- Brainspotting can also help if you are experiencing somatic symptoms and issues in your body that medical providers cannot make sense of and diagnose. When it comes to trauma, the body keeps the score, and a body-based approach is often needed during treatment. By healing your brain, you can also experience healing in your body.
- Expansion brainspotting targets the reforming and reinforcement of positive neural networks in your brain and can be a transformative therapeutic experience. Expansion brainspotting can help you deepen your spirituality, reclaim lost parts of yourself, increase creativity, heal from addiction, heal from overeating or undereating, meet performance goals, and reconnect with lost states of being (peace, trust, joy).
Narrative Therapy
- Narrative Therapy believes that as people grow and develop throughout life, they accumulate life experiences that shape a narrative around their identity, worth, and value. There are helpful narratives we can embrace about ourselves and unhelpful narratives. Narrative Therapy believes that we construct meaning around these narratives and aims to empower people to explore alternative and more adaptive life narratives.
- Narrative Therapy can help you work through past traumas, losses, and disappointments in a safe and organized way to effectively acknowledge, process, and synthesize these experiences. During this process, a collaborative approach is taken and you are viewed as the expert of your life.
- Narrative therapy takes a strength-based approach to healing and helps you reclaim your voice and take back any sense of lost power. It can help empower you to decide who gets a say in your life narrative and who does not. This process can help you shift your perspective on past negative experiences and discover your incredible worth and value. Furthermore, Narrative Therapy can help you make room for your life narrative to acknowledge and celebrate your resilience, strength, and the wisdom you may have gained along your life journey so far.
Somatic Experiencing (SE)
- Somatic Experiencing is a body-based therapeutic approach used in the treatment of trauma, stress-related disorders, and PTSD. When a person experiences a real or perceived life-threatening or unsafe event, the first thing that happens is the body will have a somatic response to the stressful experience. Somatic Experiencing helps the body release traumatic stress that was unable to process out of the body during the traumatic event, thereby addressing the root cause of many trauma-based symptoms.
- Somatic Experiencing is a modality that starts with where the trauma is stored in the body, as opposed to traditional talk therapy which starts with cognition around the trauma. If you have tried traditional talk therapy before but didn’t receive the deep-level healing that you had hoped for, you might better benefit from the brain-body approach that somatic experiencing offers. Healing from trauma must include a return to the body, and the research has shown that talk therapy alone is often insufficient when it comes to regulating the body’s nervous system post-trauma.
- Somatic Experiencing can help you increase your window of tolerance and move out of an activated stress response of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. It can help you regulate your nervous system and increase your ability to emotionally regulate when triggers arise. Somatic Experiencing can also be a helpful treatment method for people struggling with severe body and brain dysregulation and high dissociation symptoms.
Imago Relationship Therapy
- Imago Relationship Therapy is a modality I utilize in couples counseling and also utilize aspects of when working with my individual clients. Imago Relationship Therapy believes that early childhood experiences will affect how we interact, respond, and communicate with others. Unmet needs and familiar relationship dynamics from childhood often carry into adulthood. In Imago Relationship Therapy, an emphasis is placed on connecting the past to the present to help increase understanding and insight as to why you act the way you do in your adult relationships.
- Imago Relationship Therapy can help you increase and strengthen your communication skills, learn how to implement and set healthy boundaries, and gain a deeper insight and understanding of your values. It can help move your partner/spouse and you closer together, help you meet each other’s emotional needs, and deepen intimacy.
- Furthermore, if in your childhood you learned that you were not allowed to have needs and now struggle to speak up for yourself in adulthood, Imago Relationship Therapy can help you begin to heal younger parts of yourself and find your voice.
Parts Work Therapy
- Parts Work (also known as Internal Family Systems) is a trauma-informed and evidence-based approach used to treat PTSD, anxiety, depression, alcohol/substance abuse, eating disorders, dissociative disorders, and more. It is a non-pathologizing approach to therapy and believes everyone has the inner resources available for healing.
- Parts Work believes we all have an “inner world” made up of parts that hold emotions, perceptions, and belief systems that impact how we view ourselves and the world around us. Some of us may have a part that gets anxious in social situations or a part that drinks alcohol to numb the pain from a traumatic childhood.
- Parts Work believes there is a protective intention behind every part of yourself. By exploring the motivation behind your thoughts and behaviors with curiosity and self-compassion, you can create a more integrated internal system. Parts work can help you experience greater emotional stability and increase your self-regulation skills. Furthermore, Parts Work is an excellent modality if you hope to heal your inner child and bring a sense of inner harmony and balance into your life.
- Throughout Parts Work treatment, I will also often incorporate mindfulness and emotional regulation techniques in our sessions together.
LGBTQIA+ Affirmative Client-Centered Therapy
As an LGBTQIA+ affirming therapist, I validate and support my clients on topics related to sexuality, gender identity, gender expression, and more. This does not mean that I attempt to change anyone’s gender or sexual identity, but rather, I desire to create a safe space that accepts and supports my LGBTQIA+ clients.
Common topics that I help my LGBTQIA+ clients with in therapy include processing past trauma, exploring their gender identity, coming out to family, sex therapy, working through any internalized transphobia or homophobia, increasing self-esteem, working through grief and loss, and lessening the impact of anxiety and depression.
You deserve to have an affirming therapist who supports you and can help you explore and process the various aspects of your identity that make you who you are. I hope to be a safe space where you can live more fully and authentically, and through therapy, you can come home to the wonderful you. Therapy can help you unpack, navigate, and work through any challenging situations that you have gone through and that may still be impacting the way you see yourself and others. I am here for you and would be honored to partner with you on your journey.
Ready to get started? Schedule your free consultation today.