My Approach to Helping
My approach to helping is to first listen. Are relationship issues causing you to feel alone and distant from your loved one(s)? Are painful events from your past haunting you and preventing you from fully enjoying your life? Is anxiety or stress keeping the people who need you from having all of you?
Once we identify the goals you want to work toward, I prepare a treatment plan tailored to you. I use a variety of evidence-based methods to meet you where you are rather than try to fit your issues into a single therapeutic lens.
One of my specialties is the treatment of emotional injuriespost-traumatic stress using Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). Many people do not realize the extent to which disturbing events from their past affect them now until they show up as: codependency, anti-social behaviors, depression, anxiety, etc. Using specific protocols and processes that are well-researched, I am able to help people work through the effects of these events in ways that allow them feel better about themselves and live happier, healthier lives.
Codependency Treatment: Do you notice you are easily motived by guilt, saying "yes" when you want to say "no?" Do you resent yourself or the other person later? Do you notice a conflict inside - one part knowing you are in a relationship that isn't good for you and the other part telling yourself you love this person? Are you tired of not feeling like number one with your partner? I use a specific method to treat codependence with very good results.
Another specialty is couples. Do you love your partner but can’t communicate without having the same arguments over and over? Do you find that you avoid opening up to your partner because you don’t think that your partner hears you? Do you feel alone in your relationship or that your partner doesn’t care about you the way you parnter used to? If you answer yes to these questions, Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) can help change negative patterns. Partnerships often start with an intense connection but over time can fade. EFT offers a way for you to learn how to communicate in ways that bring you closer together by helping you understand negative patterns of communicating, allowing each of you to express thoughts and fears in safe, respectful ways to help you to feel more bonded and close again.
More Info About My Practice
I provide in-person and online therapy and addiction counseling in Colorado, and online therapy in Arizona.
My practice is a LBGTQ safe space and LBGTQ affirmative. I have experience helping people who identify as transgender to navigate the various aspects of transition with dignity, compassion, and respect.
The following payment methods are accepted: private pay (including Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express, checks, and cash), ESI Group EAP, Triad EAP, FSAHSA cards, and Victim's Compensation in Colorado.
How Psychotherapy Can Help
Many issues require a lot of hard work to resolve and are too big for any person to resolve alone. A trained and experienced therapist can help with the most efficient and effective methods to resolution while under the protection of confidentiality. With couples, it can help to have an objective third party treat the relationship without blame of either partner. By approaching issues from this perspective, both partners can have their needs and feelings understood.
What I Say to People Concerned about the Therapy Process
All of us grow up with "raw spots" from painful experiences - many that were unintended by people who participated in them. Left untreated, the raw spots lie in wait until they get touched on in our adult relationships - personal and sometimes professional ones. Part of being human often makes it harder to see our own raw spots than to see other's, which is why therapists go to their own therapy, too. You might be surprised how many of these early experiences send unintended messages that your feelings don't matter, and you'd better do something with them that doesn't include expressing them. The "what" you learned to do with them can take many forms - using anger to get needs met in the moment, abusing substances, focusing on everyone else's needs and never your own, terminal ambivalence, and on and on. If this applies, we work on identifying the ways you avoid your own emotions and inviting your feelings, a powerful part of the human psyche that, in essence, is our internal GPS.
Therapy can sometimes feel like the emotional gym and I am there to spot you. Your nervous system sets our pace, and we lift the emotional weight you can handle at any given session. Otherwise, therapy won't feel good overall and you'll likely start looking for excuses to quit. It's a self-loving thing to respect the pace you need, and this will be part of our conversations throughout the process.
