In addition to helping you become more aware of your thoughts and emotions through talk therapy, I am trained in several modalities that can help you tune into awareness of your body, including nervous system awareness, and connecting you to inner resources to help process trauma that might be stored in your body and move toward more peace, calm, and joy.
Somatic Experiencing® (SE) is a modality based on what we know about animals in the wild. When a preyed-upon animal runs away from a predator and survives, they process the stress they’ve just experienced through involuntary physical movement that releases the stress from their bodies. Researchers believe that’s how wild animals are able to experience repeated stress but not live in a perpetually traumatized state. As humans, on the other hand, we often learn to hold our bodies in tight control—which means that instead of releasing trauma, our bodies hold on to it and it can affect our entire lives. Attuning to our natural instinct to move toward peace and calm, Somatic Experiencing provides a supportive space to gently release trauma from the body and restore a sense of resilience, equilibrium, and wholeness. Learn more about Somatic Experiencing here.
AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy) is an attachment based approach that is relational, attachment based, and somatic.
I also work with CRM (Comprehensive Resource Model), which uses eye positions, breathwork, body awareness and resources, and attachment work (including gestational) to process trauma in a safe and supported way. CRM can help you honor your survival and lovingly reconnect to your whole self—mind, body, and spirit—with a felt sense of hope, meaning, and your capacity to embody love. Learn more about CRM.
Some of the other approaches I use are EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), Brainspotting, and PACT (Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy – insights from which I only use to support individual clients at this time), drawing on the various modalities I’m trained in to create a custom, integrative approach to therapy for each unique individual I work with.
Many people associate trauma with events like war, violence, abuse, debilitating accidents, or natural disasters. We now clearly know that vicarious trauma can also be experienced from witnessing genocide and other violences. Also obvious though often overlooked and more recently studied, stress and trauma can be held in the body from daily and ongoing experiences of racism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, ableism, fatphobia, islamophobia, antisemitism, xenophobia, migration and immigration, being pushed or forced into assimilation, etc. My practice is informed by a commitment to social justice and an understanding of the ways oppression is traumatizing. We can work together toward finding more peace, calm, and joy with this acknowledged and in mind.