Treatment Approach

You are seen and related to as a whole person, including strengths, challenges and interests. Together, we’ll create your unique course of therapy. We will talk about and analyze your patterns to promote awareness. But, you might have already noticed that awareness alone hasn’t been enough to shift your most problematic patterns. We’re going to need to create new experiences that are both intra-personal (you with yourself) and inter-personal (you with me) and notice and modulate your emotions and somatic sensations, not just your thoughts.

Trauma-Focused Therapy

This practice specializes in treating traumatic stress, including Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which may relate to single or multiple episodes of trauma (e.g., assault, accidents) and complex/relational trauma (C-PTSD) that stems from traumatic relationships or situations that occur over time (e.g., abuse and neglect).  C-PTSD can cause profound disruptions in many domains, including mood, anxiety, emotion regulation, trust, intimacy, self-esteem, and executive functioning. We will take special care to understand and stabilize trauma triggers and survival responses and create flexibility in your nervous system. From there, we will compassionately and painstakingly desensitize and rewire traumatic memories/responses to create a deeper level of stability and newfound wellbeing.

Specific Interventions

We may use one or several of the following empirically supported or innovative treatments:

  • This approach uses bilateral stimulation or BLS (e.g. vibrations moving between hands, eye movements, or tones moving from the left to right ear) to assist you in processing the distressing and unresolved. The approach has two prongs. The first is called resourcing, which involves using BLS to enhance your ability to embody positive feeling states and capacities, including feeling nurtured, protected and valued. This can be healing on its own. Additionally, it can be used in tandem with the second prong of treatment involving desensitization and reprocessing or decreasing the impact of problematic memories, situations or relationships by having you imagine aspects of them in a controlled and productive way, while applying BLS. After rounds of processing, you can encounter the problem without feeling a strong emotional and physical response, leading to feeling safety, possibility or mastery where you had previously felt overwhelmed or stuck.

  • This emotion focused therapy explores how deeply you process emotions by yourself and when in the presence of others.  We will help you notice when emotion is coming up in session and assist you in riding its waves. We will explore how more fully processing the emotions that you may be avoiding, most commonly anger and sadness, can enable a deeper connection to yourself and others. We will also explore how the avoidance of deeper emotions comes at a cost, creating anxiety, irritability and disconnection.

  • You will bring awareness to your internal experience, including emotions and bodily sensations. Once you have an awareness of your internal experience, you now have the option to modify it. You will learn concrete skills that will enable you to up-regulate (increase your arousal level) or down-regulate (decrease or soothe your arousal level), depending on what you’re needing.

  • We all have different parts or self states that operate depending on our environment or emotional context. We have a different way of feeling, thinking and even behaving with those we know well compared to those we are just meeting. We have different experiences of ourselves and our capacities when we are most stressed compared to when we are most relaxed. If you are experiencing a lot of internal conflict or vacillate between dramatically different experiences of yourself (and some may be empowering and others debilitating ), parts work may be a helpful way of better integrating your nervous system. Instead of focusing on and interacting with a memory, feeling or sensation, you will be visualizing or sensing the part of you that is holding that memory, feeling or sensation. You will become aware of your parts and the valuable roles that they have played in your survival. You will learn how to interact with them with the goal of creating more internal harmony and more continuity of experience.