My approach

I approach each client through a strength-based, holistic, and non-judgmental lens. In other words, I don't think there is anything wrong with you! There are so many factors outside of our control that exacerbate the inevitable pain associated with life’s challenges.

I use a combination of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Narrative Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and Mindfulness to help individuals achieve their goals. With children and adolescents, I also utilize Play and Art Therapy. The flexibility of multiple modalities allows me to tailor my interventions to best support the goals of each unique individual.

 As humans, we are constantly making meaning of our life by integrating our experiences with explicit and implicit messages from the world around us. We then use these stories as templates to predict future outcomes. Our brains were designed to keep us alive - survive in dangerous environments, so we naturally detect danger and cling to negative emotions more often than positive. This results in the unintentional creation of problem-saturated personal narratives and harsh inner critics. In order to create a more balanced, strength based personal narrative, we can explore how to incorporate our strengths, achievements, and purpose into our narratives and befriend our inner critic.

The way we think about our experiences determines how we feel how we feel about our experiences. Thoughts are just ideas, memories, fantasies and worries constantly running through our heads when we are not concentrating on something else. They are not facts and can’t hurt us. Our thoughts get distorted in very predictable ways leading to negative feeling states. Fortunately, neuroscience tells us it is never too late to change our thought patterns. “Neurons that fire together, wire together,” is a helpful reminder that intentional awareness, practice, and repetition can help solidify new ways of thinking even through adulthood. 

We cannot solve our problems by just thinking about them. Healing involves taking direct action to create our desired emotional state. These actions might be journaling, practicing relaxation techniques, connecting with others, going on a walk, working out, or engaging in any other pleasurable activity. Evidence based treatment for depression includes behavioral activation - we can’t wait until we feel motivated to do something, we often need to take action despite feeling like we would rather sit on the couch. And overcoming anxiety often includes facing your fears with gradual exposure or engaging in behavioral experiments to test fear based thinking. Research tells us without question that movement and exercise are a key component of holistic well being and positively impacts our mental health. I encourage individuals to explore and engage in physical activities that generate positive feelings and mitigate the impact of stress and sadness.

Behaviors are easier to change when we are connected to our core values. Identifying these values and using them as road signs can help form new and healthier habits, and makes the process of striving toward our goals more meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of the outcome. What is meaningful and important to you? What kind of person do you want to be? What do you stand for? Our values can also facilitate decision making, prioritization, and boundary setting in relationships.

Since our brains are hardwired to suffer, it is not realistic to expect to experience happiness all the time. Negative feelings are normal and will not hurt you - they are sensations in your body. These sensations can feel overwhelming at times, but it is possible to learn techniques to better tolerate, process, and move through your negative feelings in order to live a life of meaning and purpose. I teach distress tolerance skills that create space for the physiological expression of our emotions, and help distinguish between healthy and unhealthy levels of emotions.

Mindfulness is the practice of observing our objective sensory experience without assigning judgment or attaching a story to it; paying attention to a focal point with a sense of detachment and getting out of the self-involved thinking that distracts us from what is actually happening in the present moment. Mindfulness offers us a way to relate to our thoughts and feelings with curiosity and kindness, observe and notice our thoughts without buying into them, create space and freedom between a trigger and our response and decrease the power of our emotional experience.