“Looking for peace is like looking for a turtle with a mustache: You won't be able to find it. But when your heart is ready, peace will come looking for you."
- Ajahn Chah
Goals for Therapy
Personal Growth
Healing
Transformation
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. To start, we get know each other and get a sense of 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.
We begin with the end in mind. Because all things end, and many of us haven’t experienced “good endings” or a “good goodbye”, we build into our process an intentional ending. We focus on your goals for an agreed upon amount of sessions and then we intentionally say goodbye. If after some time, a client has other goals to work on together, the door is open for another series of sessions. Longer-term, open-ended therapy is right for some, and if that’s the case I will refer someone to a more appropriate therapist.
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 could involve 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 our self 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. If after some time, you don’t seem to be making progress, I will refer you to another therapist.


FAQs
How much is a session?
Sessions are $160. I do not accept insurance and I do not offer sliding scales. Sessions are 50 minutes. If you want to book extra time, let me know in advance. Also, payment must be made prior to our session.
What happens if I miss a session?
Missed sessions are anything that is a no show/ no call or cancelling in less than 48 hours. I will charge your credit card $100 for a missed session. I really dislike doing that, but no shows not only impact your therapeutic goals, they impact me, other clients and future clients on a waiting list who could have taken that appointment. Please call, text or email 48 hours in advance. My scheduling software sends out automated text reminders. Please respond with confirmation or cancellation as soon as you get the reminder. If you wake up sick, or your child or animal is sick and needing your care, please tend to your or their needs instead of coming in. The missed appointment fee is waived.
Missing 2 consecutive sessions, or not being in therapy in a month’s time without prior arrangement made with the therapist will result in losing the time slot and termination of the therapy relationship.
What is termination?
The term for when therapy sessions come to an end is called termination, which I think is a terrible name for ending therapy, either prematurely for various reasons or at the completion of therapeutic healing. We begin with the end in mind, that we will meet your goals for healing and therapy will come to an end. Sometimes we need to prematurely terminate due to various reasons such as: multiple missed appointments, not coming in for over a month without prior notice and agreement, not participating in your healing journey between sessions, or if either of us feels unsafe. Ideally, we have a conversation about reasons to terminate therapy.
Can it be in-person or virtual?
Sessions can be in-person or virtual. Either way, payment must be made prior to our session. My link for virtual sessions is doxy.me/holli. We may sometimes use Zoom, Facetime, or phone.
are more intensive sessions an option?
Sometimes it’s helpful to create bigger transformational shifts when you experience therapy as an intensive, rather than in 50 min. sessions spaced out over time. If interested send me an inquiry.
can you provide guidance for a self-led retreat?
Sometimes we need to just be in a different space with few distractions to reset and clear out some of the clutter in our heads. If you are interested in having some direction for a self-led retreat, whether you live in the Chattanooga area, or are traveling for a retreat, Whole Idea Healing can create a retreat for you, which could include therapy sessions. Whole Idea Healing is in an urban setting with quick access to nature. Just steps from the front door of the house on Main Street are relaxing coffee shops, delicious breakfast, lunch and dinner options. And within minutes of the house are 10,000 acres of National Forest on Lookout and Signal Mountain with miles and miles of hikes to commune with nature on mindful contemplation walks. Holli can help with a suggested schedule, downloadable guided meditations and recommended hikes. If interested send me an inquiry