My Approach to Helping
Finding healing and purpose is a difficult + daunting task. Where do we even start? How do we ask for help? Maybe you feel that you shouldn’t need help or that you don’t deserve it. Maybe you’ve spent a lifetime saying, “I’m fine,” but you feel lost + stuck. Especially when you know there are healthy parts inside of you longing to be expressed, but you just can’t seem to figure out how to reconnect with them. I'm here to create a map with you, to be a guide on this journey of healing.
My approach to the practice of psychotherapy is holistic. All of you is welcome, just as you are. Together we will work collaboratively to enhance your ability to get your needs met, make choices with more awareness, and support yourself through life’s uncertainty. This process includes assisting you in tuning in to your body, beliefs, and unfulfilling patterns in order to increase your ability to stay present with your shifting experience – where so much of our wisdom lives.
More Info About My Practice
I blend together three major modalities: Somatic, Gestalt and Creative Arts Therapy. Below is some information about each of these ways of working.
Somatic therapy includes + brings attention to the experiences of our bodies, including sensations, emotions, feelings, and yes, even your thoughts, and how they all interface to create a fuller picture of our situation. Many of us have had to survive by (or have been socialized to) diminish our connection to our body. While this was a brilliant solution for us as children, as an adult we can feel dissatisfied by this disconnection, noting that we feel stuck, anxious, or depressed.
In Gestalt psychotherapy, we bring attention to your present moment experience, the therapist–client relationship, environmental and social contexts, and the myriad of adjustments we make from moment to moment to bring to light beliefs and ways of being that are not in our awareness but are deeply impacting our behavior and choices. We engage in real-time therapeutic experiments to deepen our awareness + try out new behaviors to co-create organic coping skills.
Art therapy can assist us in accessing core material that can often slip under the radar in talk therapy. Because it activates a different part of our brain and engages our creativity, we can move out of the experience of stuckness and into visualizing solutions, calming our nervous systems, becoming reacquainted with our strengths, or discovering something new about ourselves or our situation.