My Approach

My style is gentle, direct and real. I draw primarily from modern psychodynamic, somatic, and Internal Family Systems modalities and integrate other evidenced-based therapies that I’ve seen change my clients’ lives. Regardless of pathology, I view symptoms as meaningful attempts of what the psyche is trying to regulate, worthy of thoughtful exploration. Every part of you is welcomed here — even the intolerable aspects that you may want to dismiss or omit. Instead we come at these parts with compassion and care. I’m an active and relational therapist who encourages my clients to bring up what they may be experiencing in session as it may be a microcosm of larger issues present in their relationships. I aim to create a nurturing, collaborative, and open environment where clients can unpack and process their experiences while at the same time feel seen and heard. As a therapist, I feel privileged to offer compassion and understanding to those who have been shortchanged of both. Our experiences can be just as complex as the people that we are—that’s why I attune myself to the specific needs of each client to give them the most useful support for their treatment, healing, and growth.

  • Psychodynamic Therapy

    "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
    — Carl Jung

    Psychodynamic therapies focus on how early relationships shape our emotional lives and present-day interactions. These formative attachments lay the groundwork for how we relate with others, form our expectations, our sense of security, and how we shape our self-concept. Here we delve into how the brain doesn’t just react to the world, but interprets past experiences as a template to inform present behavior and projections — much of which operates outside our conscious awareness.

    We view defenses as strategies that once protected us but now hinder growth. By understanding these unconscious processes and seeing symptoms as attempts to manage anxiety, we gain insight into our interpersonal world, which ultimately gives us a choice and a pathway to freedom.

  • Somatic Therapy

    “The body always leads us home... if we can simply learn to trust sensation and stay with it long enough for it to reveal appropriate action, movement, insight, or feeling." - Pat Ogden

    The emergence of somatic modalities  in the past few decades can be attributed to our increased  understanding of how the body plays a vital role in the processing of our trauma. Trauma goes beyond a psychological or emotional phenomenon, it gets stored in the body. Our autonomic nervous system (ANS) is constantly giving us false alerts to mitigate the potential for future threat. The pain from our past is now commanding the control center of our consciousness. Our physical sensations are now clues that can help us confront the mystery of our emotional experiences.

    With somatic therapies, we work with the notion that during a traumatic event, our survival response system can get overwhelmed resulting in a “freeze” or shut down state. This freeze can get stuck in the body and may manifest as physiological symptoms such as chest tightness, numbness, palpitations, brain fog to name a few. By tuning into these sensations through thoughtful interventions, we increase awareness and connection with our internal experience in order to discharge the frozen response.

    By engaging with these processes individuals can safely release overwhelming feelings, symptoms, and even cognitions entangled with their trauma. Somatic modalities facilitate agency over a person’s emotional and physical experiences by way of restoring the body’s vitality and regulation. Here, we harness the body’s wisdom as the entry point to healing – ultimately allowing trauma to be revised as part of our journey to resilience.

  • (IFS) Internal Family Systems

    “The Four Basic Goals of IFS 1.​ Liberate parts from the roles they’ve been forced into, so they can be who they’re designed to be. 2.​ Restore trust in the Self and Self-leadership. 3.​ Reharmonize the inner system. 4.​Become more Self-led in your interactions with the world.” Richard C. Schwartz

    Internal Family Systems (IFS) speaks to a phenomenon that the field of clinical psychology has observed overtime: that we exist in multitudes. These multitudes, separated by their adjuncts, are seen as parts of an individual’s whole. IFS posits that we all have subpersonalities and inner figures that develop in response to the experiences that we go through, sometimes to manage our feelings, other times to minimize or eliminate our pain, oftentimes to protect us from future hurts. Instead of pathologizing them, IFS views our parts as an adaptive way to protect ourselves. The goal of IFS is not to destroy these parts, but to befriend them, and explore how they may conflict or work in conjunction with each other. IFS offers a compelling stance that at our core lies a Self – a centered, compassionate, and wise aspect that brings us to our higher awareness and healing. It gives people a way to graciously control whatever internal forces are at play and access their own capacity to heal. Through this gentle process of inner connection, we can start to empathetically view our symptoms, defenses, and parts as gateways to true transformation.

  • EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing)

    "Reactions that seem irrational... come from a part of our brain that is not governed by the rational mind. The automatic reactions that control our emotions come from neural associations within our memory networks that are independent of our higher reasoning power.” Francine Shapiro

    When a deeply disturbing experience overwhelms us, our brain stores the event in an unprocessed way, causing us to relive its raw emotions, images, and sensations. This means the past keeps intruding on the present.

    EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) helps by pairing guided recall of these traumatic memories with bilateral stimulation. This process helps your brain safely process the memories, reducing their intensity. EMDR doesn’t result in forgetting about the trauma, but rather allows us to relate to it in a different way — a way that promotes a sense of control, groundedness, and an ability to live in the present.