Areas of Expertise
Psychotherapy
My psychotherapy approach integrates Contemporary Psychoanalysis, specifically Intersubjectivity Systems Theory with Depth Psychology. These are among the more non-pathologizing and strength affirming forms of psychotherapy. Depth Psychology states that the psyche's process is partly conscious, partly unconscious, and depth therapists believe that change and healing require a deeper level of processing, inner exploration and consciousness making to resolve current states of suffering and conflict.
Our collaborative work may encourage and result in deep psychological growth that leads to life changing surprises and lasting changes that enrich one's life.
This approach is well-suited for people who want to understand themselves on a deeper level, process difficult emotional experiences and discover greater meaning, purpose, self-worth and creative fulfillment in their lives. We will begin to understand your individual experience, the context of your life, past and present, and the unconscious processes that may shape your current experiences. Working together, we will create a relational space of genuine acceptance, trust, and emotional safety. I will join with you in your experience, to empathize and provide supportive holding of your emotions. I will help you develop awareness of your own emotional needs and create new ways of protecting them. With curiosity we will work to identify root causes for the current challenges you may be facing along with any underlying feelings related to past experiences. Through a relational context of compassionate understanding, painful emotional experiences can be transformed into opportunities for meaning making, character development and dynamic healing.
Dreams
As part of my therapeutic work, I provide dream analysis. Dream analysis is helpful for reaching the hard to feel emotions of our waking, conscious life. Dreams are unconscious gold, in that they help us understand our emotional world through their symbols, images, and emotional narratives. Dreams can further our work in helping you understand your deepest feelings that are being presented to you by your own psyche. We can work together to interpret your dreams and gain a deeper understanding of your feelings and experiences to help alleviate emotional pain, and other psychological symptoms. Dreams are valuable guides for our work.
Trauma
My work emphasizes traumatic experiences and the impact they have on our lives. Trauma is the experience of overwhelming and intolerable emotions in the absence of an empathic relationship in which it can be processed. Conceptually, this is the basis for all psychological symptoms and relational difficulties. Trauma comes in all shapes and sizes, impacting every human life; whether it be life shattering trauma or cumulative trauma that occurs over years in such a manner to chip away at one's soul.
Trauma does not have to remain traumatic if it can be held, understood and contained within an empathic relationship; a relational home.
We will be patient in exploring, holding and containing your painful experiences to develop greater tolerance and integration of all of your feelings, past and present. I am highly attuned to your emotional world, and to your words. With empathy for your experiences, I help hold your painful feelings allowing them to become more tolerable each time we feel them. We will address the impact your experiences have had on your life and how they may be creating harm for you currently. My approach is to provide a relational home in which you will finally come to feel understood, mirrored and attuned to in such a way that makes pain more bearable so that life, work, love and relating become more manageable and enjoyable for you. Trauma does not spare any of us; what we can do is feel, relate and exist as we move our way through it, together.
I treat the following:
Depression
Anxiety
Trauma and PTSD
Childhood Abuse
Addiction
Obsessive compulsive disorder
Marital or relationship struggles
Self-harm
Eating disorders
Bipolar disorder
Dissociative disorders
Personality disorders
Co-dependency
People pleasing
Phobias
