Therapy Services

Trauma & Emotional Wounds

Emotional wounds from painful experiences and trauma can result from:

• Life Threatening Traumatic Events

• History of Childhood Abuse or Intimate Partner Violence/Domestic Violence

• Ongoing Racial, Gender, and/or Sexual Identity Microaggressions

• Sexual Harassment or Sexual Assault

• Intergenerational Trauma and Other Dysfunctional Multigenerational Patterns

• Grief and Other Significant Losses

• Experiencing the Covid-19 Pandemic

• Any Painful Experience Leaving Emotional Wounds Needing Healing That You May, or May Not, Perceive as Trauma

It’s important for our therapeutic work that I intentionally create a nurturing space for healing through our therapeutic connection. Our rapport is cultivated in warmth, acceptance, and respect, used along with my clinical trainings, including EMDR, Trauma Focused CBT, and Somatic Experiencing, to provide personalized support for the healing of your emotional wounds.

Anxiety

Anxious thinking might have been valuable to you as a survival tool but it is hurting you now, exhausting you, and keeping you from peace. Overwhelming worries have a specific function within people struggling with anxiety, typically rooted in self-protection. I provide individualized therapy to help you to understand how your worried thinking cycle presents and functions. Together we will work to honor its intention to protect and we will collaborate to develop alternate, compassionate ways to meet the needs served previously by worried thinking.

Sometimes worries have an identifiable catalyst, other times panic or overwhelming worries might be a confusing experience without an identifiable cause. Regardless of how you are experiencing anxiety, I have extensive experience supporting people with identifying effective calming techniques and providing psychoeducation to better understand the function of anxiety and panic. I frequently lead personalized, one of a kind, guided meditations or somatic exercises during sessions to help identify effective methods to manage anxiety symptoms, hyper-arousal, and panic attacks.

There seems to have been a large increase in reported anxiety, panic, and obsessive compulsive symptoms since the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. For many I have supported, long simmering anxious thinking, obsessions, and compulsions have intensified during the stress of the pandemic. Perhaps this is your opportunity to face barriers to your inner peace and learn how relaxation, reframing and other accessible interventions can help you. For some, attending in-person therapy can even increase anxiety; learn more about how online therapy in California might meet your needs here.

Attachment & Intimacy Struggles

Early developed attachment has been shown to impact future relationships, to impact your ability to trust, and to impact your ability to connect to others and to yourself. Perhaps you experienced a disruption in attachment with a primary caregiver, perhaps you could not rely on consistent support from the adults you loved, or perhaps dysfunctional multigenerational patterns prevented a development of healthy attachment bonds. If you choose to follow this yearning to challenge an anxious, avoidant, or disorganized attachment style, we can work together to support the development of a secure attachment style and achieve healthier connections with yourself and others.

The want for true intimacy from secure attachment can present either individually or within a romantic context. I provide space for your reparative attachment experience coupled with unconditional positive regard for those I support. I utilize the trust we build in our therapeutic relationship, your unique, identified internal resources, and my various clinical trainings in attachment based therapies, including Attachment-Focused EMDR with individuals and Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) with individuals and couples, to address attachment and intimacy concerns.

Individual or couples therapy can support healthy growth and healing in these areas. If you are unsure about which therapy service would be best for you, please reach out to schedule your first therapy session and let us see if individual or couples services might be more effective for your goals.

It is especially important for Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) to feel aligned with a therapist on their journey to discovering who they are without the stereotypes and cultural expectations that society or families of origin or culture have placed upon you. This validation is also an important connection for folx from the LGBTQIA+ community as it allows access to unconditional acceptance that historically has been painfully denied by mainstream society and/or families.

For many highly sensitive people, society and families have shamed your valuable trait of sensitivity. You learned to mask and to minimize. These survival skills helped you to get by but have hurt your self-esteem deeply. Therapy with sensitive people can help increase self acceptance and self esteem.

Connection, knowing, and appreciation of yourself is a precious journey you may feel called to address within individual therapy. I help you to explore these needs in a supportive therapeutic environment in order to access previously unknown clarity, confidence, and alleviated mental health symptoms connected to these struggles. I believe you have the capacity to fully know and love yourself and deserve to live a life free from insecurity and self-doubt.