Areas of Focus
For Individuals and Couples
Complex Trauma:
Our unresolved trauma sits like internal ammunition, and we often cannot predict when the switch will be flipped — when our internal ammunition will explode in the face of perceived threat. Our work together helps you discover the patterns of these “triggers” —like breadcrumbs on a path, they’ll guide us to the pain, fear, and meanings that past events have carved, embedding those patterns deep into your nervous system like an instruction manual. By uncovering the scars acute or chronic trauma left, we can find what you internalized it to mean about yourself, about the world, about relationships. These insights broaden your awareness, such that we can begin to expand your space between stimulus and response. When we can understand what is happening inside us and why, we gain the freedom to choose how we respond to “triggers”. Over time, our “triggers” soften, fade, and perhaps even resolve.
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Anxiety:
It comes in different shapes and sizes and shows up in different ways — everyone wears it differently. One thing is consistent: anxiety holds us back in ways we wish it didn’t; it diminishes our sense of peace. In small doses, and congruent with immediately needed action, anxiety can be useful for motivation. But when anxiety is amplified, and/or constant, it can be disruptive or even debilitating.
The body’s alarm system creates errors sometimes, causing a signal for survival threat where that threat isn’t in fact present. When we can determine what is real, we can take back the emotional reins. I’ll help you develop ways to create a sense of safety within your nervous system, so you can begin to be freed from anxiety’s restraint.
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Relationship Challenges and Dysfunction:
Our romantic relationships are some of our most important and protected relationships. They can invoke the highest sense of joy and connection, and are also the contexts in which our hearts are supremely vulnerable and primed to be triggered. When we zoom out of the intricate details of interactions, fights, and hurt feelings, we can almost always find a cyclical conflict pattern occurring that disrupts sense of safety and closeness in the relationship. In our work together, I help identify and tease out the nuances of these cycles, and teach the couple how to disrupt the current pattern, creating the peace, connection, and security both partners desire.
Self Esteem:
Disruption to self esteem beats within the pulse of depression, anxiety, ADHD, and many other psychological challenges and disorders. Through our work together, we’ll find what’s driving your specific blocks to confidence, and where they came from. From there, I’ll guide you in developing a stability in knowing yourself. This is confidence – it’s not about what we do, it’s about what we know about ourselves and the trust I ourselves we develop from that place. This causes a sense of grounding within social, professional, romantic, academic and other settings that have been the battleground for your self esteem.
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Traumatic Brain Injury:
It’s as if you’re in a bad dream – the kind where you’re trying to run, but for some unknown reason your legs don’t work. You wish with everything in you that you could wake up – for everything to go back to normal.
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a physical injury to the brain that can cause damage to various brain functions, which may include memory, attention, processing, word finding, and emotional regulation. In addition to functional changes, the injury itself and the devastating impact of these changes can cause profound psychological affliction. Where injury to the brain is present, so too is injury to the psyche.
You may feel like a stranger in your own brain—dropped into a new country, trying to read a map written in a language you've never seen. It's scary, lonely, deflating. Together, we'll safely process what you've endured, navigate this new reality, and manage the painful emotions that come with it.
Acceptance doesn't mean giving up. It means learning to work with the reality you didn't choose so you can continue living and growing – moving forward. Our brains are continuously capable of evolving, adapting, and creating new connections; this is called neuroplasticity, and it remains possible throughout our entire existence. Even after injury, there can be growth, adaptation, and new possibilities. I'm here to help you find your way forward.