Therapy with Me

We humans — each one of us unique selves in a body— our expressions are always situated in a world which is personal, familial, cultural, and interconnected.  We live in within “nested systems” — social contexts shaped by processes and histories and larger narrative structures (e.g., cultural, political, social, biological, and environmental). 

• Mutual Empathy: Empathy is a cognitive and affective capacity to listen, feel, see, and experience the responsiveness of the other, which supports growth.

• Authenticity: Engagement requires relational authenticity, which is informed by "anticipatory empathy"—thinking about how one's expression impacts the other person—rather than unrestrained, impulsive honesty.

Sociocultural Therapy is a lens that considers various concentric circles of change shaping and shaped by each other. — the self as shaped by environments and shaping them too. Therapy can start in a 1:1, client-therapist setting. And the work in this relationship offers changes at other relational levels — core people and beyond.

To learn more about my areas of focus section, go here.

My training in an integrative somatic trauma therapy informed model has deepened my understanding and approach to attachment as a system that includes nature, land and place, relationships to time and culture, and a broadened understanding of historical and ancestral legacies.

This view is grounded in research and theoretical work that has expanded attachment therapeutic possibilities by including important facets not previously considered, such as cultural influences, and attachment as growth-oriented, thus changeable and contextual throughout the lifespan.

Attachment is fundamental to our secure functioning in the world, yet the idea of being "securely attached" has been defined narrowly in the field of psychology — rooted squarely within the mother-child dyadic relationship, later extending to the "caregiver," with implications that one's attachment is a "fixed" and enduring style, created as an early-life template determining relational life outcomes.

Taking into account the larger forces that exist beyond — yet deeply influence — the dyadic relationship or family system— includes the often-invisible wounding of racism, and human displacement due to war, poverty, climate, and other environmental crises, current or past.

A more expansive attachment conceptualization includes healing practices that engage the body, nature, land and place, relationships to time and culture, and a broadened understanding of historical and ancestral legacies. This reconceptualization holds possibility for the therapeutic relationship and the larger project of human flourishing and possibilities of deeper connections with oneself and in the world.

We can learn to relate to ourselves, others, and our world in different ways — through many kinds of relationships and in many relational configurations, therapy being just one. Therapy can be a starting place for creating safety as well as a safe place to explore and expand upon relational safety practiced there — a “nest”, a “lab” and “practice and play” space — choose the metaphor most supportive to your path and wishes for what most needs tending in your life.

I am particularly indebted to learning with trauma therapists experts in brain-and body-based modalities, Linda Thai and Deb Dana, specifically their training that incorporates the interplay between interpersonal neuroscience and the nervous system, complex developmental trauma, attachment and cultural shaping.

Integrative Somatic (“Body Based”) Trauma Therapy

While we live and move through our days inside bodies, for many of us the body can be an unknown entity, a source of deep or chronic pain and scary.

Our physical body  — how we move in the world — is shaped by our experience and memory, our past and present.  Yet, we are often “in our heads” disconnected from the rest of our body in many forms of “talk therapy”.  An embodied, or somatic approach to therapy, takes the view that our bodies hold important information and we can learn to listen to our whole being, along with the meaning making with do with language and cognition. Using our present sense awareness, and all of our senses, offers us more access to what is already here for us.

My professional training includes recent work in interpersonal neurobiology such as Polyvagal Therapy, which supports attachment repair in connection with the nervous system understanding.

Internal Family Systems (IFS), Sensorimotor, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Lifespan Integration, Mindfulness and Mindful Self Compassion also work with understanding how our stories “live” in the body and the mind, and each offers ways of integrating in support of as whole human healing.

I utilize my training in these therapies as we work with your identified needs.

To learn more about my areas of focus section, go here.

We make sense of our lives through language, through stories — those received through cultural norms and messages, those passed down and inherited in our families, culture, and biology, and those we create as we experience the world.

From a narrative orientation, I support individuals and relationships in exploring the "shaping" stories in order to find ways to move through the world with increased agency, clarity of values, and purpose. The ways we understand the narratives, or stories, of our lives can strengthen us.  And, they can also be debilitating and limiting. 

All of the orientations I lean on bring elements of “narrative” — yet the starting places vary. For example, when we begin with the nervous system (a more embodied approach), we are listening to the connection to memory and story in a less cognitive way and then we “make meaning” to what we listen to from our “gut” tells us (for example) by giving language to what it tells us. Thus mind and body work together all the time, but the “entry points” are different and give us different information.

From a narrative therapy perspective, we look at the problem as the problem — situated within broader sociocultural contexts — rather than looking at the person as the problem. In other words, we create space in an otherwise automatic truth telling or view about the self in relation to your life and relationships in the world.

When we can separate the person or relationship from the problem, we often can identify alternative ways to view, act, and interact with moments, daily life, and begin to imagine and enact preferred ways to move forward in the present, creating new and more expansive narratives for oneself in the world.

Such spaciousness offers a helpful distance to explore the often automatic stories that make up what we often take for granted as the whole truth about ourselves and our situation.

We work together, always with you as resourceful and as the expert of your own life. Your many skills, abilities, values, commitments, beliefs, and competencies will help us work with, and shift, your relationship to the problems influencing your life.

We explore possibilities such as:

• Inheritances or legacies you may wish to honor, bring forth, and know more deeply.

• Inheritances or legacies you wish to shed and let go of.

• Deepening one’s understanding of ancestry and legacies as neither good nor bad, but complex — working honestly with burdens and gifts.

Narrative therapy also includes an expansion of possibilities, such as:

• Experimentation with new vocabularies and knowledge traditions beyond a Western frame.

• Adopting a posture of witnessing and accompaniment.

• Honoring collective forms of care and resistance.

• Activating collective webs of responsibility.

• Identity exploration and healing related to identity dimensions and impacts of dominant cultural narratives and oppression.

Narrative therapy "turns":

• Involve creating and enacting our own preferred futures in the present, in light of past and present dominant narratives — "what I am walking toward through these words, this action, with these feelings…"

• A "turn" toward agency — "what I stand for."

• A turn toward dignity — "what I endure."

Letter writing is a powerfully supportive tool that can take many different forms from a Narrative therapy approach.

A note on ACT: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is a behavioral approach I utilize, depending on a client's goals — particularly in working with ADHD — that shares philosophical assumptions with narrative approaches, namely that we construct our realities through language, which shapes our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Read more about ACT under my description of that area of focus.

To learn more about my areas of focus section, go here.

Buddhist and Existential Therapy share some commonalities, yet are rooted in different cultural lineages and some key differences. This overview is not meant to be exhaustive, but a brief sketch of how my training in both influences my practice.

Both

• Offer a trusting, attuned relational process that therapist and client create together.

• Active stance and focus on and in the present and a focus on sensory experience in the moment.

• Consider past suffering and strategies for protection and survival as often “overloading” our present and, to different degrees, explore automatic skills, strategies, and ways of moving and being in the world as sometimes blocking our sense of possibility, agency, and freedom.

• Support an exploration of suffering and wishes, with guidance toward clarity of purpose and presence.

• Strengthen inner wisdom, inner listening, and action aligned with what matters most to you.

• Open up possibilities and spaciousness as ways of relating to the nature of being.

• Consider mind-body as integrated.

• A shift away from a "true self" — a self that is originally fixed or permanent — and toward a self "in the making," always forming and in a process of becoming.

• An orientation toward interconnectedness within all beings and the world. Being "at home" in the world is an ongoing practice of living with the tensions of being human, within "both/and" complexity — finding resonance with perspectives that move beyond dualisms like individual/community and self/other, toward more relational worldviews.

• Neither aims to fix and cure, but rather a focus on acceptance of what is true in the present moment.

Buddhist Psychology

The intellectual and spiritual lineages that inform Buddhist psychology stem from Pali tradition, 20th Century Southeast Asian Traditions, Primarily Burmese and Thai lineages of practice, and psychological research and neuroscience.

Mindfulness and its benefits have influenced western thought, yet are often stripped of origins and contributions. There is much to learn about contemplative practice in Eastern traditions. Here I will highlight several key aspects that have my therapy practice and stem from training in Buddhist psychology:

• the interplay between acceptance, compassion, loving kindness, and change.

• interconnectedness, social engagement and isolation, loneliness.

• mindfulness — this has come to mean many things in therapy and in Western culture, having to do with both acceptance and change. In essence, paying attention to the breath, and noticing practices can tune us into our present focus and nature supports increased compassion and a relationship with the world, more attuned, more aware of self, senses, and our worlds, without trying fix or change. This a moment to moment practice that can support our mental health in myriad ways.

Existential Psychology

The philosophy that undergirds therapy from this orientation was an “anti-authoritarian” one at its core. Rejections of Western Science, specifically dualist thinking of a mind/body split stemmed from earlier critiques of Christianity by philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in the 1800s.

This is philosophy against “totalizing” forces. In other words, living with authenticity includes living with inevitable tensions in living with the freedoms of being in the world fully.

Freedom and responsibility includes the anxieties of uncertainty, agency, and the one certainty — death. All of these are “givens” of our existence.

Existential thought considers the present and is also “future” oriented. Living with the possibility of choice in response, in movement, and with a larger sense of where one has and can creative more agency in the world, despite seemingly insurmountable barriers.

From this space, a relational one that refuses to “already know” we can often find more room to see possibility and take responsibility for living into these, thus with the aim of seeing our patterns more clearly, moving — with a greater sense of play, lightness, and creativity — toward new options and choices, and more agency over our lives.

Like many therapeutic traditions in the humanistic, relational realm, this approach pays particular attention to being in the world as a situated being within larger cultural, political, historical, and ecological environments.

From this orientation, we identify and explore your worlds and worldview, identify, name and expand understandings of values and stuck places, with the aim of taking action and moving towards a future with more personal purpose and meaning, sharing similarities also with a narrative therapy orientation.

To learn more about my areas of focus go here.