Therapeutic Approach

Therapy offers a collaboration between client and therapist as they discover new and preferred ways to be in the world. I believe that every person has the ability to move toward and achieve health and healing. My approach is to work in partnership with clients to identify their goals and meeting them through effective models of psychotherapy.

All human experiences create responses and memories within our bodies.

All human experiences create responses and memories within our bodies, cognitively (beliefs and narratives we hold), emotionally (feelings we have in response), and physically (how the body takes in experiences through all the senses). When these life experiences are overwhelming, distressing and/or traumatic, patterned responses can cause us become anxious, depressed, reactive, and/or stuck. Our bodies and minds developed coping patterns in response to these experiences. These can include (but not an exhaustive list) addictive patterns, avoidant behaviors, panic attacks, despair, and/or the inability to regulate our arousal system. We often experience a repetition of these patterns in our relationships, further re-enforcing distress.  Psychotherapy has the potential to change and resolve traumatic events and destructive relational patterns. Integrating Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing Therapy (EMDR), Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Internal Family Systems, multi-phased trauma treatment, and Attachment Theory provide effective ways to resolve trauma, and other powerful events that have restricted our abilities to grow and pursue goals and happiness.

I am EMDR certified and an EMDRIA Approved Consultant and Specialty Trainer. EMDR Therapy is an adaptive information processing therapeutic model that is effective for a broad range of psychological, emotional, and physiological issues. EMDR Therapy assists and facilitates the alleviation of symptoms and disturbances related to individuals’ pasts and current lives; moreover, EMDR Therapy promotes the development of healthy ways of being in the future.

I integrate the following models and therapeutic approaches into EMDR Therapy, allowing for a broader approach that tailors to a client’s needs:

Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS) is an approach to psychotherapy that identifies and addresses multiple parts of self within each person’s mental system. These parts of self consist of wounded parts and painful emotions. IFS identifies protective parts of the self that developed ways to cope with distress and trauma. IFS looks at resolving conflicts between parts of self, heal the wounded parts and allowing one’s ‘Core Self’ to be more available and present. 

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy helps individuals to process the somatic responses to trauma and attachment wounds and assists them in assimilating these experiences both cognitively and emotionally. Treating the body’s memories of trauma helps to heal emotional and cognitive wounds.

Narrative Therapy focuses on the stories individuals construct about their lives. Stories can instruct individuals how to act, think and behave in the world. Stories can be enabling and empowering or dominating and destructive. Narrative Therapy assists clients in re-authoring their life’s story from a limiting, destructive one to an empowering, strength-based one.

Attachment Focused Theory describes how individuals’ earliest relationships set the foundation for all future relationship patterns. When attachment to caregivers is less than secure, children develop strategies to cope and maintain connection. These coping strategies can become problematic as the child develops and moves into adulthood. Addressing attachment styles and healing attachment wounds allows individuals to create healthy relationships in their current lives.

Multi-Phase Trauma Treatment conceptualizes the recovery process in three stages: establishing safety, remembrance and mourning the traumatic events, and reconnecting with self and others. The purpose of the first stage is to help re-establish one’s basic sense of safety and trust which begins to allow the body to move from a survival state to a thriving state of being. In the second stage, remembrance is the ability to name and tell one’s story and to have one’s story witnessed in a safe therapeutic relationship; this is a slow and mindful process to integrate and heal past traumas. Mourning the impact of these traumas is part of the healing process. In the third stage, one begins to develop a new sense of empowered self and feeling increase connection to this healed self. Focus can then be on current life and relationships and the future.

Furthermore, I am also trained in brief-focused therapy, systems (family) therapy, advanced treatment in Hypnotherapy, multi-phased complex trauma treatment and dissociation, and couples treatment – All of which I integrate in my work with clients.