Specialties
Trauma
Trauma refers to the enduring injurious effects on our nervous system, physiology, self-beliefs, emotions, behaviors, and relationships resulting from a lack of childhood emotional attunement, abuse, neglect, and distressing/life-threatening events and circumstances.
Nervous System Regulation and Somatics
We unconsciously interpret the world through the lens of our nervous systems, whose sole job is our survival and whose baseline is established through lived experience.
Symptoms of anxiety, depression, and dissociation are adaptive responses to perceived threat to our nervous system, and can be relieved with somatic (body-based) tools that help the nervous system rewire toward safety. As our nervous system learns to shift toward a more regulated baseline, our ability to effectively use talk therapy expands.
Psychotherapy (Talk Therapy)
Traditional talk therapy provides an opportunity to reflect on how our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors interact with each other. The process of verbally exploring our self-beliefs within the context of a safe therapeutic relationship can offer incredible insight and the opportunity to repair attachment wounds, as well as help the brain cognitively integrate healing.
Internal Family Systems/Parts Work
In childhood, the inherent internal aspects (“parts”) of ourselves adapt as needed to help us maintain attachment with caregivers, cope with traumatic life situations, and survive. While our parts’ choices may at times feel dysfunctional to our current lives, they’re unfailingly doing their best to protect us and navigate life with unhealed wounds.
Through carefully paced parts work in therapy, we can meet our parts with curiosity and compassion, understand their roles, honor their experience, and offer them healing. This process alleviates symptoms and allows us to live from the grounded, authentic, wise-minded Self that has always existed within us.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
Our brains cannot adaptively process and integrate trauma without sufficient emotional support. This traumatic content is then stored in the brain in an unprocessed form that dysregulates the nervous system and creates symptoms of anxiety, depression, and PTSD.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is an empirically-supported method of therapy that uses Bilateral Stimulation (BLS) in the form of rapid eye movements or tapping to help the brain integrate unprocessed traumatic content in the mind. EMDR also incorporates “positive resourcing” to reverse the impact of trauma and build emotional resilience.