THERAPY APPROACHES

TRAUMA THERAPY

If your reaction to a current situation or challenge feels too big, overblown, or overwhelming, when logically you know it shouldn't be this upsetting or hard, you might have "old stuff" being activated by present experiences. Whether you think of yourself as someone who has experienced trauma or not, the type of therapy designed for trauma can be incredibly impactful in releasing the negative beliefs, emotional reactions, and blocks that are affecting you today.

The type of trauma therapy I do addresses unhelpful things someone took away from a negative experience or trauma that continue to negatively impact your life. This may be any negative experience that has lasting effects for you; what is trauma can be different for different people. I use a blend of approaches, including EMDR, to guide you through identifying how negative life experiences have affected you, and to process it effectively so you can move beyond it towards the life you want to live. You can read more about the types of trauma and negative life experiences I focus on here.

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“...it is hard to imagine the scope of an individual life without envisioning some kind of trauma…”
Mark Epstein, MD
The Trauma of Everyday Life

RELATIONAL THERAPY

I work from a relational approach, meaning that I view all types of relationships throughout ones life as significant and impactful. We build our relationship in our work together as a method of healing and growing. We may also look at your early and current relationships from an attachment lens, considering how your early experiences of care, love, neglect, abuse, or whatever it looked like for you affect your current relationships, emotional well-being, and the way you view yourself and cope with the world.

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One of the approaches I use, AEDP, focuses on "Undoing Aloneness." Sometimes the greatest harm, trauma, or challenge comes from being left alone with our feelings, being told they are wrong or too much, or being asked to ignore, repress, or deal with them alone. Through therapy, we can address these past experiences and the lessons we took from them that are no longer helpful, such as "I am too much" or "I am not worthy" to build a deeply felt sense of connection and worth.

EMBODIED THERAPY

I work from an embodied approach, a fancy way of saying that I consider and incorporate the ways our bodies hold memories, traumas, and strategies for coping with challenges, and that our bodies are where we first experience emotions before our mind interprets them. Sometimes these approaches are called somatic. Either way, in session that means we might stop to notice how your body feels, where in your body you're experiencing an emotion, or how your body is reacting to certain memories or topics.

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Sometimes a coping strategy someone learns to deal with early experiences of trauma or aloneness is to disconnect from feelings and their body. That means we might take our time to slowly reconnect, while also focusing on staying grounded and feeling safe to explore. But it doesn't mean you're not a fit for this type of work, and might mean you could find some deep meaning and growth from embodied therapy.