About My Practice
I work with adults age 18 and older and I am happy to work with clients with cognitive disabilities as long as therapy is appropriate for their individual needs.
I am an ally. My office is also a safe space for cultural and religious diversity.
Anxiety Specialist
Grief
PTSD
Social Anxiety
Stage Fright
Panic Disorders
Sexual Abuse
Trauma
Women’s Issues
Depression (Mild to Moderate)
Life Transitions
And many other challenges
Who am I
I have a great deal of life experience in the creative arts and I bring that to my work in therapy using my intuition to notice both the details and the bigger picture. Each Client is given attention as an individual who is wonderfully unique with different strengths and life experiences. In a nutshell we will explore together the positive and negative patterns of your life and work on a specific set of goals that you choose as we begin therapy. We will work together using evidenced-based practices to help you towards those goals. It sounds really intense, and it can be hard work, but it can also be adapted to each individual in a creative way. Below are some of the therapies and modalities that I use.
What I do
Mindfulness – This is a type of meditation that helps bring
our mind into the present so we are not as focused on the past or the future. Here are a few ways Mindfulness can be adapted for clients: fishing and paying attention to the sensory experiences while enjoying the activity, painting and becoming fully engaged in seeing the subject and recreating the vision, playing basketball and feeling invested in the body as it moves, walking and noticing the beauty of nature with all five senses, playing with your pet and being fully present to their expression of self.
DBT – from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy I utilize techniques
like distress tolerance which is the important life skill of learning to tolerate being upset or distressed. Life has many stressors and for some people these stressors are so difficult to tolerate that they react physically or with what I call big emotions (which can be expressed internally towards the self or externally towards others). Learning to calm the self and to stand in the middle of a stressor takes work and set of coping strategies. Learning these skills can make a huge positive change in a person’s life.
Solution Focused Techniques – just as it sounds using a practical approach, looking at and addressing easily targeted and accessible problems
CBT – Cognitive Behavioral Therapy looks at the connection between thought, feelings, and behaviors. Some ways to work on changing our negative patterns are through examining out thoughts and questioning them which works very well in a variety of journaling, poetic and artistic models as well as in straight forward asking ourselves if what we are thinking is actually true. We can also change our behaviors in a variety of ways and not all of them need to be painful or unpleasant. Imagine a parent wanting to help their child increase their reading skills, and creating a treasure map with a really excitingadventure that the child must read in order to solve. For adults it might be changing the way you approach a problem.
IFS - I use aspects of IFS and Ego States therapy to address the parts of a client that may need some help due to past trauma. A great book to get an idea about how IFS therapy works is “No Bad Parts.”
