Helping People Find Therapists & Advocating for Ethical and Healthy Therapy & Marriage Counseling Practices

My Approach to Helping

I help people develop trust in themselves. I help people begin to believe in themselves again. Sometimes all we need is a benevolent witness, and when we have that person with us, we can overcome anything, no matter how dark or sad, we can heal. Just one person who knows all our mistakes and thinks we're great anyway. Someone who looks at us like we matter, like we're valuable and good enough as is. When we have that environment we naturally heal.

 

More Info About My Practice

I do EMDR with many clients. This helps people connect with the truth in their body. I have found that we begin to have an authentic, grounded experience when we integrate the mental narrative with the experience inside our body--our as-lived experience. EMDR helps us to begin to know our as-lived/bodt experience, which gives us a truer foundation for the narratice of our life that we carry and maintain in our heads. When this integration happens, everything begins to make more sence, everything begins to settle down, and we have more moments of contentment and inner-guided wisdom, and life gets easier.

 

How Psychotherapy Can Help

When bad things happen to us as children we have no choice but to mentally put them in a box and drop them at the bottom of the ocean, and then live as if those things never happened. This splitting off of our lived experience helps us survive childhood. But at some point those cement boxes bubble up (impossibly--defying gravity!) from the bottom of the ocean and start creating problems in our life. Whether it's a DUI or a substance abuse issue or a severe relationship issue, those childhood wounds play out. The only way I've found to address the current life problems is to address those original childhood issues. As adults we are in a position to look at them, process them, and begin to carry them differently. We integrate those things that happened, we begin to acknowledge that we were innocent (but we try to minimize the blame game as much as possible), and we begin to envision new beliefs about ourself. Once we have new beliefs, a whole new life opens up, new things become possible. On the other side of pain is joy. This is what I've seen work. This is how psychotherapy, in my opinion, generally helps people.

 

What I Say to People Concerned about the Therapy Process

Trust takes time. Trust happens when clients know--really know--that I care about them, that I care about what they think and how they feel, and that I don't think they're crazy or defective--that I trust them, so they can begin to trust themselves. And then the other part is: I let clients know we're going to go as slow as they need to go. I remind them that therapy is a collaborative, co-created thing, that the client and I determine how fast or slow we go, and there are no rules. Sometimes, in fact, clients want to go faster into the painful feelings than I think is really prudent. I try to get them to slow down and take smaller chunks of the pain because I think the how is just as important (if not more important) than the what. In other words, how we process the pain is just as important as processing the pain. That the ends DO NOT justify the means--that the means themselves are everything, and if we can have compassion and patience as we do the therapy, this will generalize to other areas of life, and everything will improve. And for those clients who feel overwhelmed just talking about their pain, I assure them that we will titrate the work and go just as slow as they want, with lots of time in between for them to relax and let all the stuff subside before going back in. I think it's extremely important that clients help pace the work, and that client and therapist together find the ideal pace for the work (not too slow and not too fast) but just inside that

Services I Provide

• Individual Therapy & Counseling
• Marriage, Couples, or Relationship Counseling
• Family Therapy
• Group Therapy
• Online Counseling / Phone Therapy

Ages I Work With

• Teens
• Adults

Languages I Speak

• Spanish

Groups I Work With

Adults Molested as Children; Adult Children of Alcoholics; Compulsive Overeaters; Love Addicts; Sex Addicts; People who are co-dependent

Therapy Approaches I Use

• Anger Management
• Critical Incidence Stress Debriefing
• Dialectical Behavioral Therapy
• Gestalt Therapy
• Gottman Method

Concerns & Issues I Help With

• Reproduction
• Abuse: Emotional, Physical, or Sexual
• Trauma
• Addictions & Compulsions
• Life Changes
• Social Skills & Problems
• Emotion Management
• Attachment
• Health & Body
• Identity Issues
• Relationships & Marriage
• Depression & Mood
• Family Problems
• Self-Esteem & Confidence
• Anxiety, Fear, & Stress
• Sexuality
• Spirituality