General Approach

This approach uses bilateral stimulation (BLS)—such as vibrations alternating between hands, eye movements, or tones moving from the left to the right ear—to help you process distressing and unresolved experiences. EMDR is widely recognized as an effective tool for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and is often part of complex PTSD and anxiety disorder treatments, along with many additional applications.

Phase One: Building Resources for Stability - The approach has two prongs. The first is called resourcing, which involves using BLS to strengthen your ability to access and embody positive emotional states, such as feeling nurtured, protected, and valued. This alone can be therapeutic, helping you build resilience and emotion regulation skills.

Phase Two: Desensitization and Reprocessing - The second prong focuses on desensitization and reprocessing. This involves decreasing the emotional impact of difficult memories, relationships, situations, or triggers. Your therapist will assist you in activating a scenario/memory network.  After this occurs, you have the opportunity to create new learning or a positive revision through a highly methodical and fully supported process.  

The Outcome: Over multiple sessions, this method allows you to revisit painful memories, scenarios or triggers without feeling overwhelmed. Our clients report feeling a sense of mastery, calm, or even possibility, replacing fear, helplessness and general distress.  Processing yields insight, expanded perspective, increased agency and wellbeing and a much clearer demarcation between past and present experiences.  

This attachment-focused therapy will help you process your emotions–first with your therapist and eventually generalizing to your other relationships. We will support you in noticing when emotions arise.  We will gently guide you through the experience, helping you ride its natural waves, enabling you to process rather than extinguish or spiral in feeling. Many people, especially those who have experienced early relational wounds, tend to avoid certain emotions, most commonly anger and sadness. Avoiding deeper emotions was once protective, but over time, it erodes vibrancy and flexibility, leading to chronic tension, anxiety, irritability, numbness and loneliness. You will explore how attuning to and staying present with underlying emotions can deepen your connection to yourself.  You may be surprised to find that new emotions emerge, including gratitude, pride, joy, and relief along with a palpable sense of feeling seen.

What Are Parts?

We all have different parts or self-states that show up depending on our emotional context or environment. You might notice that you feel, think, or behave differently with loved ones than with strangers, or that you experience yourself more positively when relaxed than when under stress. These shifts can be confusing, especially when they involve internal conflict or marked shifts between parts that feel empowered and those that feel overwhelmed.

The Approach

This is where Parts Work Therapy, grounded in the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model, can be a powerful tool. This approach helps you understand and integrate the internal parts that drive your emotional responses.

Rather than focusing only on a memory or emotion, you will learn to connect with the specific part of you holding that experience. You will observe and interact with parts with an appreciation for how they fit together to create their own family or system dynamic.  You will transform polarization and intense negative feelings toward and among parts into a deep appreciation for the role that they have played in your survival.  You will learn how to speak to, guide and release parts from the burdens that they may be holding.  This will ultimately lead to more internal harmony and enhanced wellbeing.

You will bring awareness to your internal experience, including emotions and bodily sensations. This awareness is the first step in stress management and an essential part of managing energy and anxiety levels. Once you're aware of what’s happening inside, you gain the ability to shift it. Whether you're feeling overwhelmed or disconnected, you'll learn how to respond with intention. Through guided support, you will develop concrete skills to regulate your nervous system. You'll learn how to up-regulate (increase your energy level) or down-regulate (decrease your energy level).  Mindfulness is an overarching skill that will be applied throughout your treatment and is a key feature of experiential therapies. 

We will collaborate to figure out which of the following modalities will factor into your child’s treatment based on their evolving needs, ensuring a tailored and flexible approach to child and adolescent therapy:

Parent Coaching - This helps parents go beyond surface behaviors to explore the underlying causes of their child’s symptoms. Together, we examine how family dynamics influence presenting concerns and identify practical strategies for change. These parent coaching services not only target symptom relief but also support building a stronger, more connected relationship between parent and child.

Family Work - This approach offers a safe and structured space for open, respectful communication. These sessions often incorporate experiential tools that help rebuild trust and enhance connection. Family therapy for teens is especially valuable when addressing emotional regulation, misunderstandings, or behavioral patterns that arise within family systems.

Individual Therapy - These sessions may be more skills-based and structured or more open-ended and spontaneous, depending on the needs of the child/teen and phase of treatment. Sessions may leverage creative projects, humor, pop-cultural references, visual aids, games and props to soften defenses and aid in emotional expression.