My Approach to Helping
I've been helping individuals and couples transform their lives for many years. One of my objectives is to help you experience meaningful change and achieve your goals in the most efficient amount of time possible. Unlike more traditional approaches that focus primarily on talking, I help you have new emotional experiences that enable you to truly resolve core issues, move forward unencumbered, and have the life and relationships you really want and deserve.
AEDP, an empathic and engaged approach to therapy, fosters new and healing emotional and relational experiences. Drawing from the fields of mindfulness, attachment, and interpersonal-neurobiology, I'll help you to feel safe and supported to do the emotional work needed to heal and change in the ways you want.
My work is informed by evidence-based findings in psychology which allow me to provide you the most current and effective care. In addition, I am an EMDR Approved Consultant and therapist and readily incorporate EMDR into my work when appropriate.
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 partner used to? All relationships experience disconnections & conflict. You can get back those good feelings that brought you together in the first place. Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) can help change negative patterns. Partnerships often start with an intense connection but over time can fade. I offer 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 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, FSA and HSA cards, and Victim's Compensation in Colorado.
How Psychotherapy Can Help
Many people don't see all of the strengths they already have but are not fully utilizing. A trained and experienced therapist can help with pointing these out and building on them. 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.
