Therapy for those who want to thrive
Integrative and evidence-based therapeutic support
Specializing in bringing together evidence-based, somatic and integrative approaches for
Trauma
Complex trauma
Grief and Loss
Anxiety
OCD
Depression
Relationship challenges
Personal Growth and Identity
My approach to therapy
Offering in-person and telehealth support, and specializing in integrative, somatic and evidence-based therapy (including EMDR) for trauma and complex trauma, anxiety disorders, OCD, grief and loss, depression, and relationships issues.
Trauma
I assist clients dealing with trauma and complex trauma by providing integrative trauma support. Trauma treatment often also includes addressing the connection between trauma and grief, OCD, anxiety, or depressive symptoms.
Trauma can arise from a single event or develop over time through ongoing adverse experiences in our upbringing. Childhood trauma isn’t always a result of what happened, but also what didn’t happen. A brilliant trauma therapist once described trauma not just as recollections or memories but as relivings. When we lack support, trauma can manifest in various ways. These effects include persistent negative beliefs, such as “I don’t deserve good things” or “I am not safe”; physical symptoms like feeling overwhelmed, numb, highly stressed, or excessively caring for others; and emotional responses including rage, profound grief, sadness, fear, or emotional numbness. The reliving of trauma occurs not solely through memories, but through thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, and changes in nervous system states. This can create confusion and overwhelm, but you can regain your sense of well-being, agency, and joy. Some of trauma’s most devastating effects are persistent shame and isolation. Feeling isolated and alone after trauma may worsen trauma symptoms, sometimes as much as the original experience. The goal of trauma treatment is to support you in regaining your experience of your agency, self-worth, and safety, to help you thrive.
Adverse childhood experiences can lead to relationship patterns that make us feel anxious, inadequate, or unsatisfied. By addressing the underlying reasons behind our experiences and understanding our emotional, mental, and behavioral patterns, we can work towards healthier and more fulfilling relationships.
Grief and Loss
Culturally, grief can feel very isolating and lonely. When we are grieving, people around us may not understand our experience, and we ourselves can feel confused, wondering if we or our experiences are normal. I trained in grief work with David Kessler, who uses a wonderful analogy: grief and loss are like a precious vase shattering. If we try to glue the vase back together—to become the same person or live life as before our loss—we may continue to feel broken, just as the vase would look broken. However, if we allow ourselves to grieve fully and live fully, as Kessler describes, and receive understanding and skilled guidance through our journey, we can build something new and beautiful from the shattered pieces. This doesn’t mean we stop grieving or missing the person we lost, but rather, we learn to live fully and find meaning alongside our loss.
As David Kessler says, all trauma involves grief because all trauma involves some type of internal or external loss. Not all grief involves trauma. Some grief or loss can be traumatic and require both trauma and grief support.
OCD
Many clients have struggled with intrusive and obsessive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors for years, often feeling deep shame or helplessness. Sometimes, OCD symptoms can be mostly mental and emotional, and have been such a core part of our lives that we don’t realize how much suffering it has caused. OCD tends to attach itself or get in the way of what we care about most, such as our relationships, parenting, work, etc. This is in part what makes it so painful.
Research is clear that effective OCD treatment requires specific types of support and that it can take a long time for people to get support and relief.
OCD is fundamentally about a need for certainty and safety. Who doesn’t want certainty and safety? However, in OCD, our brain and body have established ways of managing anxiety and uncertainty that give us temporary relief, but over time increase our anxiety and suffering, and sometimes run our lives and relationships. This is another aspect of OCD that makes it so painful. OCD causes us to ask for reassurance or answers that we cannot be certain of forever, such as: Am I a good person? Will I get fired from my job? Will my partner be faithful? Am I good enough? Will my parents get sick? Will I accidentally injure someone with my car if I drive? Will I get sick if I use a public restroom? Will I hurt someone I love? Will I develop psychosis? If I don’t take a certain action, something bad might happen, or it feels unbearable if things aren’t done a certain way or placed in a particular location. Sometimes, OCD symptoms entail intrusive images or body sensations, or a feeling that things aren’t quite right.
Effective OCD treatment at its core involves working with the ways that our brain has learned to avoid our anxiety and discomfort, and to learn to live with or ‘befriend’ certain degrees of uncertainty. This type of exposure work, called Exposure and Response Prevention, is the gold standard for OCD treatment and can be very effective and feel liberating to clients, but it can take courage to engage in. I support clients in finding this courage by remembering how their OCD-safety-seeking behaviors (mental or physical behaviors) are getting in the way of living a rich and meaningful life, or making it hard to be who they want to be in their relationships.
I trained with the International OCD Foundation, and I am passionate about bringing compassionate, evidence-based and effective support to clients suffering from OCD.
Anxiety
We all have anxiety. It would be dangerous not to have any anxiety, since it signals to us when we need to pay attention to a potential danger. Research shows that fighting anxiety just makes it harder to manage. There are a variety of ways to work with anxiety that I have found helpful to my clients, depending on each individual client. I listen carefully to my clients as they describe their experience, and I tend to ask many questions so I can hone in on their struggle and what is causing their symptoms, in order to determine the most effective treatment and way forward for each client. For some clients, anxiety is a result of their trauma or beliefs caused by trauma, and so we work with the underlying trauma. For others, there are patterns of avoidance, self-neglect, or people pleasing that feed the symptoms. For some clients, doing exposure work so that their brain and body can learn that they will be alright after facing anxiety-producing experiences is effective and can feel empowering, giving them a sense that their life is getting ‘bigger’.
For other clients who have developed a fear of their body sensations associated with anxiety and panic, working on unlinking the sensations from the fear or tolerating the sensations is helpful and prevents panic attacks. It is not unusual for clients to have developed a story about their anxiety, and as a result, they get increasingly anxious or self-critical when feeling anxiety, which then causes them to spiral.
When clients develop self-compassion and the ability to view their own experience with more curiosity and mindfulness, they sometimes realize that their anxiety is not as scary as they may have believed, and that sometimes (not always) it is actually an important signal that something stressful, needing attention, or in need of change is happening in their lives.
Fundamentally, anxiety calls to us to change our relationship to it, to become curious, compassionate toward ourselves, and sometimes just invite the anxiety to come along to what we want to do, rather than try to fight it or tell ourselves we cannot do things we want to do or live the life we want to live until we are no longer anxious. We are all anxious sometimes.