Are you feeling anxious, stressed, and/or depressed? Are you experiencing a transition: career, education, parenting, gender questions, relationship, spiritual questions, or loss of a loved one? Are you feeling stuck in your life? Let’s sit together and explore all that weighs on you. I think of counseling as a form of mentoring. You have the answers in yourself. My role is to be your companion and guide in accessing your own wisdom and power. You are stronger and more creative than you know. Therapy is an experience where I stay completely present to you, and help you explore, heal, and grow. Here are some of the issues I help with:
- anxiety, low self-esteem
- mild to moderate depression
- mental well-being and self-care
- career and life purpose challenges
- sexual orientation and gender identity
- grieving the death of someone (person or animal)
- coping with a diagnosis of chronic or terminal illness; life-altering injury
- Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), also known as Sensory-Processing Sensitivity
- parenting neurodiverse kids (gifted, autistic, ADHD); it can be isolating as a parent
- recovering from damaging religious culture/childhood or exploring spirituality
My therapeutic approach combines mindfulness and somatic techniques, cognitive-behavioral strategies, and positive psychology theory and techniques. When we work together, I create a compassionate connection with you. We can work on “fixing what’s wrong” while we also “build what’s strong” in your life.
“Not knowing is most intimate.”
–Zen koan
In more detail, here are the different methods and orientations I utilize and how they are implemented.
Person Centered: I hold unconditional positive regard for the preciousness and dignity of your being; I respect your autonomy.
Somatic: experiencing the fullness of your life in your body; building a loving, trusting self-connection with your body and life, healing from trauma, experiencing vitality and aliveness.
Mindfulness: practicing short meditation with nonjudgmental noticing, creating a pause, to become still and tolerate internal noise until it fades.
Psychodynamic: bringing the unconscious, pre-verbal early life experiences to awareness, particularly around attachment.
Inner Child: understanding the aspects of your internal world as part of a family, all of which have benign intentions even if their applications are problematic.
CBT: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy works with thoughts, beliefs, scripts, rumination and how the mind uses these to cope, how emotions can be fed by thoughts, creating a negative feedback cycle, with the goal to shift to a more balanced worldview.
Positive Psychology: identifying character traits, skills, habits, and values that already exist and exploring these to strengthen your life.