My Approach to Helping
Do you envision better relationships, EVEN with yourself? Does negative self-talk challenge the way you think, creating a variety of unsettling emotions leading to avoidance and insecurity? I offer a safe, non-judgmental space to process hardships and triumphs that create anxiety, depression, and inability to enjoy your life in the present moment. Learn how self-love and self-care improve overall health. Take charge of your sleeping habits. Find your voice, and create & maintain strong internal and external boundaries. Healthy communication skills incorporated to improve work and personal interactions for the life you deserve!
Finding the resilience within you, then building on that strength is how I navigate therapy. My goal is to help process desperate and painful times, various losses, strained relationships, recovering from abuse, stressful transitional changes, day to day struggles, and work challenges.
I will work with you to effectively address your personal goals and relational challenges that have kept you from living life. We will build on current strengths to achieve a more empowered sense of self. Sometimes the hardest part of a personal journey is not just knowing the desired destination, but determining YOUR best route. Are you moved to move?
More Info About My Practice
My office is designed to provide a sense of safety and comfort to explore your emotions. The human mind is resilient and I will work with you to manage distressful emotions and guide you towards a healthier state of being.
How Psychotherapy Can Help
As a child, you didn't know how to label what you felt, so you didn't know if the label others gave you was accurate. Think about your experience. Is it possible that you label excitement as fear? Maybe you label excitement as happiness? Perhaps when you're afraid you express anger and don't recognize the fear? These are just a few ways that you may have learned inaccurate labels for your emotional experiences.
Caregivers and those around you also taught you how to think about emotions. If your family was uncomfortable with emotions, then you probably learned to avoid them as much as possible or to push them down. If your family was comfortable with anger but not with sadness, then you are likely to express anger easily and hide other emotions. What was the message you were given about emotions?
Part of coping effectively with emotions is accurately labeling your emotions. Just knowing what you are feeling acts like a brake on the emotion. It's difficult to regulate emotions if you're pushing them away most of the time. In fact, pushing emotions away and trying not to feel will make it more likely that you?ll act impulsively or experience depression or anxiety.
An important skill to help regulate emotions is to observe and describe emotions. If you can observe and describe your emotions you will be better at regulating them. You'll also learn that you are separate from your emotions. If you can observe what you are feeling, then you are separate from that emotion. When you are separate from your emotions, then you can make choices about whether to act on them or not.
You can also choose to be at one with your emotions. This means that you accept your emotions as part of you. When you are participating in pleasurable activities, this is important. You want to throw yourself into the activity and fully enjoy it.
You can learn to accurately observe and describe your emotions. Being able to observe and describe your emotions means to be able to describe all the components of emotions: the prompting event, any interpretations or judgements or assumptions that occur, the physiological changes in the body, your facial and body expressions of the emotion, the aftereffects of the emotion and the name of the emotion. If you have a secondary emotion, label that too.
