I often think of therapy as similar to mountaineering: We tether to another person as we build trust and explore the natural landscape of our humanness. At times treacherous and scary; at times awe-inspiring and profound. The point is not to curate this expanse, but instead to build familiarity so that we can be more sure-footed as we walk through our lives with increasing skill… Comfort and ease within the chaos and uncertainty that can be everyday life. Good therapy can serve as another vantage point to provide feedback, a stable base to help catch tumbles into cyclical thought, and collaboration in finding strategic paths forward.

Below are just a few examples of some of the mental states that either bring people to therapy or come up through the course of the work.

Your complexity is welcome.

  • Trauma

    Traumatic experiences - from single incidents to complex and prolonged exposure - can have a devastating impact on our lives by fundamentally changing us without our choosing. Our altered worldview, self-view, and interpretations of events often lead to depression, anxiety, and an overall loss of feeling safety in our bodies and the world.

    Processing through trauma and its effects on our relationships with ourselves and others can help free us up from ways we feel stuck. This work can be an empowering journey of taking back our narrative to repair wounds from loss of agency and selfhood.

  • Anxiety

    Feelings of anxiety can range anywhere from an underlying texture of discomfort throughout everyday living to acute panic in more specific circumstances. Either way, these experiences can keep us from the sense of safety and comfort needed to build a fulfilling life.

    Therapy can help with identifying triggers to anxiety, recognizing it in the context of being an emotional signal instead of a claustrophobic reality, and building skills to reclaim a sense of regulation and safety to engage with life more fully.

  • Depression

    The lens through which we view the world dictates the opportunities and hope we see before us. Struggling with depression can feel like a constant battle against the bleak realities of existence, especially as the burden of despair robs us of motivation.

    Allowing space to explore the factors contributing to pain is key in disrupting typical cycles of self-loathing and internalized rage. Then self-compassion can begin to unfold, wherein we find opportunities to be nurtured instead of thwarted.

  • Addiction

    Cycles of compulsive behavior come in many forms: Misuse of alcohol or other mind altering substances; over-excessive dieting and exercise; problematic relationships with porn or sex; really any pattern of relating with the world can start to feel like an out-of-control storm we are swirling in despite feedback - most importantly from within our own intuition - that it is no longer working for us.

    I tend to believe these patterns develop with the best intentions of helping us cope with chaotic experiences, and so remove the shame to engage with my client’s journey through a harm reduction model that aims to uncover and treat the underlying traumas that influence behavior.

  • Grief & Loss

    There are many painful experiences that result from the loss of a loved one through death, separation, or even strong boundaries we have to institute to protect ourselves from chaotic relationships. Grief can also result from more abstract losses of parts of ourselves after retirement and career shifts that re-orient our sense of success, or through acute physical traumas that cause sudden changes to mobility or lifestyle.

    Through whatever means, life has a way of dismantling the previously reliable reference points that our identities once rested upon. Therapy can be a valuable resource for riding the swells of sadness, anger, confusion, and disbelief that cycle through our minds as we regain footing in life without whatever it is we have lost.

  • Family Dynamics

    Family is complicated: Within this microcosm of community, there are opportunities for love, connection, and mutual support. However, there is also ample opportunity for dysfunction, chaos, and recurring harm.

    The therapeutic process can be used to explore problematic elements of the homeostasis in a family system, roles taken on by individuals and factors at play in perpetuating them, and most importantly, where opportunities for healthy disruption and growth can occur.

  • Anger

    Anger comes in many forms and serves many functions. Our relationship with our anger plays an important role in our experience of ourselves, especially as repressed or misdirected anger can wreak havoc on our minds, bodies, relationships, and work. Too often, anger exists in a feedback loop with reactive behavior, resulting guilt, and shame perpetuating a negative self image.

    Understanding the justifiable roots to our anger, building skills in communicating it effectively within the contexts of intersecting cultures, and learning to utilize the strength in our anger to feel more empowered can all be parts of the journey to a healthier relationship with this oft-missed emotion.

  • Sex

    Many cultures have a complex relationship with sex that can lead to anything from awkward miscommunication and embarrassment, to shame and significant harm from sexual trauma. Sex is simultaneously ever-present in pop-culture and media, while also being considered taboo to the degree that comprehensive sex education is rarely available. As a result, people are often left navigating their sexual development in secret, through unhealthy exposure (either by choice or not), or attempts at outright repression of these natural drives.

    Therapy can be a safe space to talk about sex to explore our interests, build comfort and skill in communicating safe boundaries, and to unpack some of the messaging we have received that may or may not be supporting a healthy relationship with our and our partners’ bodies.

My Approach

I believe that psychotherapy can be a life-changing process to support personal and spiritual growth.

I do my best to engage with my clients through a friendly presence, while also balancing this with direct feedback when useful. I strongly believe in the importance of a collaborative approach to care in therapy, where both my client and I work together to build a healthy relationship that will best support their individual needs. I also believe in the importance of a careful balance between honoring the seriousness of heavy challenges while holding things with a light touch of humor. My aim is to empower my clients to be experts in their own right - through open inquiry and curiosity - so they can most effectively navigate the physical, mental, and emotional landscapes of their lives.

Below you can find a few of the approaches I have been trained in or am closely informed by. I do not follow any single methodology with exact fidelity to their origins, but have found over the years that each has its place in bolstering the work at different times.

Trauma-Informed

Traumatic experiences - from single incidents to complex and prolonged exposure - can have a devastating impact on our lives by fundamentally changing us without our choosing. Our altered worldview, self-view, and interpretations of events often lead to depression, anxiety, and an overall loss of feeling safety in our bodies and the world.

Processing through trauma and its effects on our relationships with ourselves and others can help free us up from ways we feel stuck. This work can be an empowering journey of taking back our narrative to repair wounds from loss of agency and selfhood.

Internal Family Systems

Though we often imagine ourselves as being layered like onions, IFS re-imagines our psyche as being more like garlic: distinct cloves of personality bundled together to form an internal “family”, with each of its members playing integral roles in our functioning.

It is the goal of this lens to bring compassion and understanding to the needs of each part of our personality, especially in understanding the needs of parts that otherwise present as dysfunctional or problematic. By being sure to have all parts of ourselves heard instead of exiled, stuck patterns of behavior that serve immediate needs can be eased in the interest of our broader goals.

Somatic Awareness

For some, life exists primarily in the head: Experiences are filtered and processed through the thinking mind to make sense of the world. Sometimes this approach falls short when we feel things that don’t make sense to us. Anxiety, anger, sadness, and other powerful emotions can be our body’s way of communicating needs, but without practice, this often feels like an opaque foreign language, leaving us feeling inexplicably off.

The goal of building somatic awareness is to become more acquainted with our body’s signals to honor the wisdom they hold. This can be especially helpful in releasing traumatic emotions that are stuck in freeze responses by bringing openness and curiosity instead of avoidance and fear.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness can be a powerful practice of bringing simple awareness to the contents of our thoughts and feelings. As this is cultivated, one can begin to recognize and build comfort in the “space” between them. This can yield a stronger sense of agency in life as cyclical thought patterns and reactive behaviors are interrupted.

We cannot control what we think or feel, but we can control our response to both.

Motivational Interviewing

Much of the fundamental drive of psychotherapy is change. Whether it is feedback from people (romantic partners, family, friends) or systems (professional, legal, financial), it is often in relation to outside forces that we begin to recognize that our current patterns are not working.

Motivational Interviewing brings focus to the stages of change that we can fluctuate between during the process of personal growth, especially by being realistic that humans do not move in a straight line. As our growth displays a natural complexity of progress, stagnation, setbacks, and relapse, this approach can be a useful lens to reconsider motivation to rekindle and direct our efforts skillfully.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

Thoughts. Feelings. Behaviors.

CBT focuses on how these three elements interact to dictate our lives. Though they form a tightly bound cycle of influence with one another, each can be an entry-point into loosening what may seem like a dense cyclone of reactivity. Certain emotions may yield particular thoughts, which will determine the ideas and impulses that guide behaviors. Experiences may be interpreted in ways that yield various “stuck” emotions, therefore maintaining unhelpful patterns of thought and ideas about ourselves.

CBT can be a helpful framework for understanding how patterns of thought, emotion, and actions are making us entrenched in suffering.

Cross-Cultural Awareness

The historical context of Western psychology has been driven by the cultural ideals of very particular demographics. Though I do believe there are some immutable standards of good mental health - such as the ability to function skillfully and with minimal harm in a community and broader society - I also take great care in prioritizing my clients’ personal goals and being aware of my own cultural influences that may not be relevant or helpful to others.

Part of psychotherapy is often reflecting on the cultural values and behavioral norms we were brought up with to identify how each impacted our development and influences our approach to relationship now. Through this we can build an individually tailored sense of identity that incorporates features of our tradition that help and leaves behind outdated ones that no longer serve us.