How I work

Most people are not sure what to expect going into therapy. On this page, I’d like to give you a glimpse of what therapy with me looks like and how it can help you reduce the anxiety you might be experiencing.

One thing I want to be very clear about: I am interested in healing my clients, which means I want you to get to a point where you no longer need me.

In some cases that can be a long term commitment to doing therapy as a wellness practice to check in and get support, but it is NOT about getting minimal progress and having you feel the same way as you did on day 1. I doubt anyone would stick to therapy if it didn’t give some sense of change.  While real and lasting change takes time and commitment, my hope is you can start noticing improvements quickly, ideally each time we meet.   

We will go into what’s currently working well for you in your life. Do you have outside support? What are your likes and dislikes? What brings you joy? What do you notice in your body as you think of that? I use a lot of what is going right to help build you up as we discuss what’s going wrong. This helps your nervous system process what’s not going well.  It’s not about just focusing on the positive while ignoring what’s terrible.  We work together to process trauma and change negative beliefs.  This creates a powerful shift where tremendous growth can happen.   

I don’t always get into talking about family right away. Therapy is not necessarily about focusing heavily on your mother or father. While parents do indeed have a powerful effect on us, there’s more to it than how we were raised. Sometimes discussing our relationship with our parents is a hard thing just by itself. We will get to that when the time is right.

I then may do some basic grounding exercises and meditation work if you’re up for it. Not everyone is, and that’s fine. Frequently when there is a history of a lot of trauma, feeling what’s going on physically can be extremely difficult.  After all, being in the body is where all the pain lives.  So we work together to establish safety and then on feeling positive things first.  

I do like to bring a sense humor to this work for several reasons.  Laughter can build rapport and connection, which then helps your nervous system to relax. It also can allow us to approach difficult subject matters with less chance of being overwhelmed in doing so. Humor can be a defense, but it can also help a person cope with something extremely dark. With that said, we won’t always just hang with humor and allow it to not process traumas, the pain needs to be felt in order to heal, but we do it slowly and deliberately taking away trauma a piece at a time.  Dark and twisted humor does not disturb me, and for many of my clients they’ve already developed a hell of a sense of humor! We can use that to heal. 

Finally, when our time is up we will discuss scheduling our next session. If we’ve hit on something that feels like it’s really big or super uncomfortable, I may extend our session a bit if needed if our schedules permit. I don’t believe it’s ethical to just end right when the clock strikes twelve if you’re not ready to go back out into the world.

If you are in the waiting room waiting for our session and I’m still in session, I will try to come out and let you know there might be a slight delay before starting, that way you aren’t sitting there wondering what’s going on.