Whatever’s on your mind, it’s valid.

We make sense as humans. So whatever it is you’re experiencing, it’s understandable if we look at the context. If you’re having panic attacks “out of nowhere,” they’re generally not out of nowhere if we start to expand the lens; there’s an understandable reason. If you’re losing your temper with your kids, it’s not because you’re a terrible person but because there’s an understandable — maybe not healthy, but understandable — reason.

Compassion toward ourselves and others goes a long way in starting the work of individual therapy. Sometimes we just need to step back to see “the forest for the trees” in order to understand and accept that we’re reacting normally for the upbringing we had, recent life events, an ongoing mental health condition, relationship stressors, etc. — even if we don’t like it and still want to change.

We can work together to figure out what’s going on and why, and then make the changes you want to make.

For my part, I will bring a compassionate stance, directness, some humor, and my insights from training in the following areas. (This is where it might get boring, so feel to stop reading if you’ve heard enough!)

I love this stuff, though, so here goes!

1) Psychodynamic Psychotherapy — this is the base of most therapy today. It assumes that there are forces driving our behaviors and thoughts that we’re not always aware of. Maybe it’s something from childhood, maybe it’s based on a traumatic experience, maybe it’s a personality type…? Psychodynamic psychotherapy explores what’s beyond our conscious awareness. In my Masters program, I was mentored for two years by Dr. Ann Bernhardt, who studied and worked under the eminent psychodynamic psychologist Erik Erikson. I consider this an invaluable part of my foundation as a therapist and still rely on much of the advice I received from Ann and the field of psychodynamics.

2) Mindfulness and Compassion — more and more research points to the benefits of mindfulness practice and self-compassion. For many years of my own personal growth, I was guided in these disciplines. I later became part of the mindfulness community at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Center for Mindfulness through their Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program. I follow the work of Kristin Neff, Christopher Germer, Ron Siegel, and Tara Brach and have participated in their trainings. I see these skills as helpful in every form of therapy and include them in the work I do.

3) Bowenian Systems Therapy — this is an approach that looks at family dynamics as well as intergenerational patterns that shape a person. How were you impacted by your mom? Your dad? Your grandfather? What was your role in your family — the scapegoat, hero child, lost child, something else? Was alcoholism a family pattern? Abuse? This look at how individuals are impacted by the systems in which they grow up is based on the work of Murray Bowen, a founder of family therapy. When I worked in community mental health in San Diego, we used Bowenian therapy exclusively. I love how it conceptualizes people as part of a web of relationships, and I draw “genograms,” or family trees, when I take my notes about each of you because of how key I believe these forces to be.

4) Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) — it’s hard to practice therapy without using CBT, which is to say that we look at your thoughts and see how these thoughts impact how you feel as well as what you do. There are rich tools in CBT like learning about cognitive distortions such as catastrophizing and ruminating, or always seeing the glass as half empty. CBT can help stop negative thinking and replace it with healthier, self-supportive thinking, so that a person feels less anxious, self-blaming and hopeless. This can lead to healthier behaviors. CBT is a tried-and-true, evidence-based practice, and I definitely bring it into therapy when it’s appropriate.

5) Inner Child Work and Healing Our Core Issues (HOCI) therapy — this is one of my favorite forms of therapy, and it’s about discovering childhood wounds and making sense of them, reparenting that child-self, then carrying the healing into our adult experience. HOCI is based on the work of Pia Mellody and focuses on five core issues of the self that can get damaged or under-developed in childhood: esteem, boundaries, “truth,” moderation/spontaneity, and dependency. This process can be life-changing and deeply healing. I trained for two years in the method and completed the full protocol. I continued to meet monthly in group consultation with one of the creators of the HOCI model, Jan Bergstrom in Boston, who worked many years with Pia. Now that Jan has retired from this role, I continue to consult monthly with Penny Norford in Virginia who also worked directly with Pia.

6) EMDR — (See the link for EMDR to get more info on this.)

7) Antagonistic Relational Stress therapy (sometimes called “Narcissistic Abuse” recovery) — Many people find themselves in relationships with someone who is persistently conflictual, rigid, antagonistic, lacking empathy, entitled, self-absorbed, dysregulated/angry/ “tantruming”, and who devalues, invalidates, minimizes, manipulates, gaslights or dismisses them. These relationships can be chronically soul-crushing and instill a sense of sadness, loneliness, self-doubt, shame, low self-worth, hopelessness, confusion, guilt, and other feelings. It can be very hard to understand what is happening. There can be cycles where everything is going well, and then it turns bad again. I embarked on training in 2022 to get better equipped in working with individuals in this situation. If this resonates with you, please email me or set up an appointment because you deserve support for what is a very trying situation.

8) Other trainings — I’m a very curious person about what can help people and myself, and so I routinely take short trainings and read books to add to my understanding and toolkit. Some of these include Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) for impulse control and calming “big” emotions, Somatic Experiencing (SE) for connecting what a person feels inside their body to what is going on in their mind and heart, the mind-gut connection to consider the impact on mood of nutrition and inflammation, tree and nature therapy to understand the role of phytoncides released by trees and fractal patterns such as tree branches that soothe the mind to look at, Motivational Interviewing (MI) for reluctant individuals, and Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) for trauma.