Anissa Cordova, Psychotherapist - NLC0105614

Are you a person who has not taken the conventional route? Maybe you have experienced that sense of Other or Outsider frequently in your life? If so, you are among my favorite kind of people to help! I love to support my clients by educating them about how our brains and bodies are influenced by our emotions and then teaching how to build emotional navigation skills on this foundation. I am a licensed HeartMath Provider, certified in EMDR, and have a certification in Positive Psychology from UPenn. While I am very skills-focused, I do believe an enormously helpful part of therapy happens in the moment, by being present and really listening.

My resume is definitely not a conventional one--some things are, I did wait tables in grad school! But I also led bicycling and hiking tours across the western US & Canada for about seven summers. And then I got to help save lives by spending almost 12 years working in the field of organ donation. It was an amazing experience; I worked in 24-hour call shifts, traveled all over Colorado and Wyoming, and was immersed in tragedy, bravery, love, sadness, compassion, courage and *sleep deprivation.* I learned about the unique challenges of working in an atmosphere of life and death. The extreme intensity of this work led me to find HeartMath\'s Resilience Building program, which I learned to teach to others and began practicing personally. I credit these skills with allowing me to figure out how to pull myself out of the deep, dark abyss of compassion fatigue and overall burnout. It also created in me an interest in helping people dealing with the effects of trauma so I became certified in EMDR and Positive Psychology. I offer both psychotherapy and coaching services, depending on each situation. With guidance, my clients have: • learned to listen and communicate more effectively • improved mental clarity and problem solving skills under pressure • achieved greater creativity and “outside the box” thinking • restored nervous system health and increase energy levels • gained the ability to recognize and disengage from the negative impact of stress Contact me if you are: • interested in boosting your resilience, composure and clarity • dealing with grief • dealing with anxiety • feeling challenged by chronic illness • a medical provider or first responder struggling with work-related stress • in charge of training at your organization

I am lucky enough to have lived so long that I have experienced a multitude of struggles, but one of the bigger ones is when I was in my mid-twenties and getting settled into grad school and I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. In the moment, it felt like The Worst timing! And while dealing with cancer and surgery and radiation and hormones did throw a wrench into my graduate school plans, in the big picture, I see it taught me the best, most helpful lessons in life. I learned about gratitude and being present and priorities--boundaries! I learned so much about boundaries. I understood for the first time that our lives are indeed finite and I experienced the clarity that comes when our lives may be in jeopardy. More directly affecting my practice, I have experienced things in the medical system that are impossible to understand by description and can really only be understood by going through them ourselves.