Approach to therapy

Coming from a holistic perspective, my approach holds in heart and mind that each person innately has inside them what they need to heal. My focus is on the health of your whole person, body-mind-emotions-spirit. We work together with compassionate inquiry, mindfulness and therapeutic models, such as AEDP, Interpersonal Neurobiology, Schemas, Memory Reconsolidation, parts work and EMDR to experientially process old patterns of experience and help you to embody new, more effective patterns for living.

We begin wherever you are. On the first session, we get the lay of the land, your personal geography, habitat, ecosystem. We create a map, a plan, for where we go next, what needs you have that need to be addressed first. Clients have different goals, so length of therapy varies. Sometimes it’s a few weekly sessions to meet someone’s goal. Sometimes it’s a few years of weekly or biweekly sessions to meet several goals.

We attend to the body. Since the body is the portal to wisdom, we do more than just nourish and nurture it. We use mindful awareness to notice what is showing up in the body because all emotions have a location in the body. Trauma can get stored in the body. Becoming aware of somatic body sensations allows insight and healing to be possible. I might also refer you to additional body support, like acupuncture, massage, physical therapy, qi gong, or tai chi or for functional medicine lab tests.

We are present with the emotions. Opening up to our emotions is crucial for healing and transformative growth. We must feel to heal. That being said, it’s wise to pace our emotional process. Emotional distress can create chaotic volatility, like landmines or volcanoes. Or defensive emotional patterns can impose walls of resistance like a fog, or feeling like you’re stuck in quicksand. When we’re opening up to feeling emotions, really being with them, we proceed with care to increase the capacity to be with emotions in an integrative way.

And we cultivate the mind. Habits of mind shape our worldview. “What we dwell upon becomes the shape of our mind. The shape of our mind becomes the shape of our world” (The Honeyball Sutta, the Buddha). Neuroscience confirms what the Buddha taught, that thoughts, feelings, experiences and actions that fire together, wire together, forming the shape of our neural networks. Dan Siegel teaches that “where attention goes, energy flows, and neural synapses grow.” We can change our neural networks through being intentional with our attention. Thought patterns can really trick us into thinking a particular perspective is going to bring us success, keep us safe, or make us happy, but they can actually have the opposite results. Introducing mindfulness skills into your daily life can increase your ability to notice and catch those tricky thoughts that are like trailheads, where you go down a trail that doesn’t end where it promises it will. Rather than having thoughts lead you down those same disappointing trails, with mindfulness you can choose not to go down that trail. And actually, just being present with that understanding–that you don’t have to go down that trail–is an empowering freedom. It’s at this point that you can look around for new “trailheads” that look interesting and you would now prefer to explore.

Therapy is a relationship

Through the intention of holding space for the deep work of addressing emotional, self-defeating patterns that no longer serve, clients can find the insight and inner-strength needed to heal. It’s important to know that I hold compassion for all parts of you because all of those parts, even the parts that you may loathe and want to get rid of, are there for you on purpose, by design, as protectors.

Ultimately, my aim in therapy is to work with someone to recover and cultivate their own relationship to their inner guide. It usually involves doing trauma work, like EMDR, emotionally-focused attachment work, empathic work with trauma projections and reenactments, and compassionate/mindful-reparenting. Sometimes circumstances can arise that cloud our judgment and we get disconnected from our intuition, finding ourself triggered by re-enactments. Therapy can be helpful to work skillfully with the triggers so we get clarity again. 

Therapy can be really enjoyable: having a time set aside for you, being able to vent frustrations, and addressing old habits of mind that prevent you from having clarity and feeling free. Therapy can also be hard and somewhat painful. Ajahn Chah, a Thai Buddhist teacher in the Theravada tradition said it well when he said, “There are two kinds of suffering: the suffering, which leads to more suffering, and the suffering, which leads to the end of suffering.” Mindfulness-based, trauma-informed therapy can involve some suffering as we work through things, and with a compassionate approach we can be with the pain as it is experienced with skillful presence, releasing frozen-in-time feelings and false beliefs which created more suffering by holding on to them.

I’m not a good fit for everyone. During the first few sessions, you and I will see if we are a good fit, or if another therapist or modality might be a better fit.