It’s my hope to support you in exploring and connecting to your own hopes and dreams while finding creative and nurturing ways to integrate the adversities you've experienced - whether they be every day challenges or major experiences of violence, trauma, and abuse.
Overall my approach is client-centered - meaning you play a big part in deciding how we work together.
It is also trauma-informed - meaning I bring an awareness of how bodies and beings respond to adverse experiences and I center consent, safety, and choice.
I also bring a justice lens to my work - meaning I seek to see the ways that mental health struggles are often responses to trauma, violence, harm, and oppression. This also means that I work to be aware of my own experiences of privilege and oppression that may interact with our work together.
Those are the pieces that form the foundation of my own values and ways I approach counselling and below are a few of the modalities that I have experience and training in and can bring to our sessions:
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EMDR is a therapy approach used to help people to integrate and heal from traumatic and distressing experiences. It’s quite different than other approaches because we don’t necessarily talk about what happened. We use bilateral stimulation - fancy word for a going back and forth process that can happen with eye-movements, sound, or sensation - to connect with the body’s own natural inclination to integrate and process traumatic experiences. For more information you can check out the EMDR International Association’s website here: https://www.emdria.org
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There are a number of different somatic modalities all of which center the body, relationality, and an understanding of interpersonal neurobiology. For me attachment - meaning the way we form relationships with others - is interwoven with the way I understand a somatic approach.
What this may look like in session is bringing in an exploration and presence to sensations in your body. It can also look like connecting to things you find resourcing and supportive while exploring challenges or past traumas.The somatic approach I have been the most informed and influenced by is Sharon Stanley’s Somatic Transformation. For more information you can check out her website here:
https://www.somatictransformation.com/ -
Response-Based Practice is an approach to therapy rooted in social justice and seeing individuals within their larger context. As an approach it looks at the way individuals respond to and make sense of the world around them. This helps us to see and understand how certain mental health symptoms or behaviors may be normal responses to experiences of injustice and violence.
In a session this could look like exploring the ways your experiences and challenges have been responses to adversities you have faced in the external world.
For more information: https://www.responsebasedpractice.com/ -
Dreams have been a central part of the way I personally interact with the world from a young age. I have had a hard time connecting with most of the traditional approaches to dreams in psychotherapy. Rather than analyzing dreams I like to relate directly to them, communicating with them, and appreciating them for the deep offerings they can be.
In a session this can look like exploring the different elements of a dream, re-entering a dream through visualization, or using somatic approaches to explore the felt sense of a dream. It can also look like building practices to deepen connection with dreams, work with lucidity, and communicate with our dreams. Working to integrate and navigate nightmares and other challenging dreams can also be a part of this work.
I have explored many different ways of working with and integrating dreams into healing practices and have found myself the most at home with the work of Robert Moss. For more information: https://mossdreams.com
