My Approach
Unique therapy for unique individuals
Let’s face it, therapy is weird. One-on-one meetings that are specifically focused on attending to you are not often experienced in daily life. While this might initially feel strange or unfamiliar, it is precisely this strangeness that gives therapy its transformative power: by creating an environment unlike any other in your life, the therapeutic space becomes a quasi-enchanted bubble that can transmute obstacles into pathways and wounds into assets.
When you’re first getting the lay of the land, psychotherapy can also seem like a tower of babel of language games, pet theories with their respective shape-shifting acronyms, and charismatic personas with their impassioned communities of followers to boot. That’s why I focus not only on principles that are effective across therapeutic modalities—I focus on the ones that will work for you.
Generally, your role in therapy is to share your experiences (past, present, and in-session), to reflect on and apply take-aways from our sessions, and to be open to change. This enables us to collaborate on the awarenesses, insights, action plans, and emotions that further you along the road to the life you envision. This might sound simple and easy—and sometimes it is—but it is also challenging and can take real courage. Sometimes it can even be surprisingly enjoyable— hell, you’re taking the time to explore yourself and grow.
I tend to work experientially and relationally. I am deeply attuned to what is happening for you and between us from moment-to-moment in our sessions, and am focused on supporting the generation of new, transformative experiences for you—not just new understandings. Insights open the door to change, but experiences are needed to cement them.
I am interested in creating a space where you feel understood, cared for, respected, admired, cheered on, and celebrated—while at the same time helping you ignite your self-agency and inner badass.
We will work together to reduce your overall stress, anxiety, tension, and overwhelm by developing an understanding of your life story, what’s currently happening, and what steps to take next—so you can feel relieved, organized, and on track.
I’m comfortable getting very concrete and research-based, as well as far out, speculative, and spiritual. If you vibe with a particular psychospiritual tradition, I am happy to align our work with it. For me, it’s all about what works for you.
For your interest, below are my descriptions of some general therapy approaches that might inform our work together:
Cognitive-Behavioral
CBT focuses on the connections between thoughts, beliefs, behaviors, and emotions. CBT emphasizes learning immediate practical tools, information, strategies, and skills to make step by step improvements in your current life situation. For example, CBT helps to transform core beliefs and cognitive distortions that cause emotional distress and self-sabotaging behavior. “Third wave” CBT refers to cognitive-behavioral techniques that focus on cognitive functions other than, but related to, thinking and feeling. For instance, things like mindfulness, acceptance, psychological flexibility, self-awareness, and metacognition—how we relate to our thoughts rather than the thoughts themselves.
Emotion Focused
Emotion focused therapy primarily uses experiential techniques to harness adaptive emotions and resolve maladaptive or reactive emotions. Emotion focused therapy specializes in the subtle functions of emotions and affect—think of affect as all the small changes in your moods and feeling states that have not quite blossomed into emotions yet. Through emotion focused therapy you can connect with the underlying purpose of your emotions so that they empower, instead of sabotage, you.
Existential/Narrative
Existential and narrative approaches focus on how you make meaning in your life, especially of elements that may feel meaningless, hopeless, or pointless. By examining the biggest and most relevant questions to your situation, we can ignite your personal perspective to find freedom within confinement, meaning in meaninglessness, as well as determination and passion. By experimenting with new ways of telling your story, you are able to harness your autonomy and power as the writer of your own life story. You can learn to transform narratives that are no longer serving you in order to turn your story into one that you helps you feel empowered and enlivened
Psychodynamic
Psychodynamic therapy emphasizes the underlying workings of your mind: your unconscious. This includes all the mental processes outside of your conscious awareness, such as implicit and procedural memory. These influence your thoughts, behaviors, emotions, sense of self, and general experience. Psychodynamic therapy pays particular attention to your psychological and neurobiological development—your life history. It can lead to profound personal transformation as well as resolution of long term and underlying issues.
Systemic
Systemic therapy looks at how systems of relationships (families, couples, groups, friends, colleagues) can catalyze and perpetuate psychological symptoms. Systemic therapy focuses on shifting patterns within a system and changing roles individuals are compelled to take within them. Sometimes ongoing dysfunctional patterns in a system are counterintuitive—attempts to make the problem better make it worse. This can require an outside perspective and experimentation to address.
Jungian/Archetypal
In Jungian psychology, life is considered a journey towards individuation—growing into a more authentic version of yourself by balancing and integrating aspects of your conscious and unconscious minds; particularly by bringing unconscious parts of yourself to consciousness. Each individual comes into the world with a personal mythos—a cast of inner characters and storylines—and by paying careful attention to your present situation, conscious attitudes, as well as dreams and the symbolic language of your unconscious mind and imagination, we learn to collaborate with these characters and stories in order to help you reach your potential. In part, by setting your cast of characters within universal stories of human experience.
Somatic (Body-based)
Somatic therapy focuses on how the body factors into your psychology and experience. Somatic interventions can involve movement and embodied expression, focusing on and processing body sensations, developing embodied awareness, and learning tools to balance and regulate your nervous system. Somatic therapy is like working with your mind from the bottom up—sometimes small shifts in the foundation can lead to the biggest changes in your life.
Relational
The human mind and organism are inherently social and develop through interpersonal interactions. Relational therapy focuses on how you relate with others. In particular, it focuses on your closest relationships and the underlying dynamics of the client-therapist relationship. The counseling relationship is an ideal place to dive into these dynamics and experiment. As relationships shift and you feel more comfortable, confident, whole, and authentic, other parts of your life and mind can fall into place.
Transpersonal
Transpersonal therapy focuses on human potential and the furthest reaches of human nature. In part, it specializes in extraordinary experiences, such as, peak experiences, spiritual experiences, altered states of consciousness, psychedelic experiences, mystical experiences, and exceptional human experiences. Transpersonal psychology has a long history of looking beyond psychopathology. the disease model, and mainstream western psychology to other cultural paradigms and models of mental health and well-being. Overarching convictions are that humans are more than their personal identities and that profound healing can result from connecting with aspects of oneself beyond ego, having extraordinary experiences, and committing to one's own unique psychospiritual development.