My Approach
I'm asked a lot how I work with people. I believe it is important for the therapist to be:
PRESENT with the experience, emotions, and insights the client is having in the moment.
ENGAGED with the client's process, both listening and giving feedback.
AND HOLDING STRONG BOUNDARIES creating consistency, containment and safety, allowing the client to access their truth.
These are the foundations of a healthy therapy experience.
I got my start in hypnotherapy and Neuro-Linguistic Programming, healing methodologies that stress the importance of the unconscious mind’s influence on conscious thought and behavior. I spent my graduate school experience immersed in the teachings of Jung and the practice of Depth Psychology.
This tradition champions the importance of the unconscious mind and the mind/body connection, as well as the myths and archetypes that are windows into the human psyche. In my early experiences as an intern I worked with chronic mental illness and at-risk youth. After licensure I built on this foundation adding training in couple's therapy, sex education, EMDR psychotherapy, and special populations like sexual minorities and adult children of narcissists.
I took a working sabbatical in 2020, during which I reassessed. I changed. After the murder of George Floyd, I deepened both my social justice practices and my relationships to communities of color, specifically Centering Black Women. This has led me in fruitful new directions such as decolonization, ancestor reclamation work, the re-integration of ceremony and ritual into my work after a 20-year absence, and as Dr. Jennifer Mullan, author of Decolonizing Therapy advises, “politicizing my practice.” This means that none of us exist outside of cycles of oppression and injustice, and that therapeutic work can help us question how both our privilege and oppression points conspire to make us feel sick, and that my healing is inextricably tied to your liberation, and vice versa.
Additionally, I have reconnected with a personal and professional practice of psychedelic medicine, both a return to my Deadhead roots and a foray into an exciting new avenue of patient care. I am partnered with Journey Clinical as a provider of Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy, or KAP.
I resonate with, am inspired by, and weave in:
DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY
EMDR PSYCHOTHERAPY
PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY
COGNITIVE BEHAVIORAL THERAPY
DIALECTICAL BEHAVIOR THERAPY
GESTALT THERAPY
SOMATIC MOVEMENT AND DANCE THERAPY
ART THERAPY, MUSIC THERAPY, AND EXPRESSIVE ARTS THERAPY
EXISTENTIAL/HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY
FEMINIST PSYCHOLOGY
MY FAVORITE OF THE GREATS IS CARL ROGERS. HE BELIEVED IN THE POWER OF
LOVE, AND IN PRACTICING WHAT IS CALLED
“UNCONDITIONAL POSITIVE REGARD.”
If you are excited as a client
by a methodology I’m unfamiliar with, I will familiarize myself with it.
.
I am sex positive, kink friendly, poly-am friendly and LGBTQIA +- affirming. I practice harm reduction in addiction counseling.