MY APPROACH
People are not problems to be solved but complex beings with lives to be lived.
Regardless of the exact treatment approach, my overarching goal in each therapy course is to create a partnership with you where we work out together what process will work best.
Because I’m trained and practiced in a variety of approaches, I can tailor an individualized treatment plan to fit you and your intersectional identities. This approach consistently elicits positive feedback from my clients about their therapeutic experiences.
I offer psychotherapy to individual adults and couples and tend to use modern and structured approaches with all of my clients. By first establishing a set of values-driven goals, we find a useful place to jump-start our alliance and understand what’s causing distress.
During our therapeutic relationship, I will draw from one or more of these biopsychosocial approaches which, when integrated together, I have found to be highly effective and universally helpful.
Discover paths to articulating and living more meaningful lives.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) falls under the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) umbrella, an approach that has become the treatment of choice in recent years for numerous mental health issues, such as depression and anxiety. ACT represents a shorter-term, symptom-focused therapy that highlights the current situation and any patterns that maintain it so we can create effective treatment goals.
In values-based and compassion-focused therapies, there’s weight placed on attentional skills building to deepen our presence and intentional living.
As many evidence-based clinicians do, I use a formulation-driven approach to therapy, which pulls from the research and theory of CBT and integrates that with the clients’ individual story. Within ACT, I draw on models of different well-known problematic patterns to help the client get a concise understanding of where their sticking points are.
At the beginning of therapy, a clinical formulation is typically created in partnership with the client. This formulation elegantly captures important problem-development information, the current issue, maintaining factors, and the clients’ treatment goals. This jointly-made clinical formulation, as well as a focus on functional assessment of distress and skills building to monitor therapy progress, is a hallmark of well-delivered CBT and ACT.
Spending more time just being can feel like joyful play therapy for adults.
Compassion Focused Therapy and Mindfulness
Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) is another biopsychosocial theory like ACT that helps us broaden and deepen our perspective and connection to ourselves and our lives. One of the major strengths of CFT is the emphasis on broadening our contextual awareness of our common humanity and neurophysiological framework. A main feature here is encouraging clients to foster more helpful relationships with themselves and develop more neurologically-informed emotion regulation abilities.
New neurological connections and focused change can shift our focus away from threat and survival and towards connection and contentment.
In CFT, we practice developing more attentional regulation via mindfulness and compassion-focused exercises. These types of foci allow us to settle and reset our nervous system by creating more internal safeness. This is a major mechanism of change in CFT. Here we can use neuroplasticity (our brain’s readiness for change and integration) to our advantage. Research on compassionate meditation is so hopeful, telling us that we can spend more of our days growing our most recently evolved social system to be feel safe in our bodies.
I group CFT and mindfulness together because many of the benefits of mindfulness come with practicing compassionate motivation, where we are deeply guided by our values and the desire to be helpful to ourselves and others in our transitory lives. With roots in eastern meditative practices and wisdom traditions, both CFT and mindfulness are incredibly useful approaches to organize our attention and the “full beautiful catastrophe” of our lives.*
Mindfulness in the simplest terms can be described as learning to choose our focus and quality of attention.
Dr. Kabat-Zinn** describes mindfulness as paying attention in a particular way to the present moment with a non-judgmental stance. Thich Nhat Hahn, a global spiritual leader, poet, and peace activist, has translated mindfulness to mean familiarization, and speaks of becoming more awake and open-hearted in the world. There have been numerous studies to date showing the positive effects of practicing compassionate mindfulness—including stress relief, reductions in numerous mental health symptoms, anatomical and functional brain changes, and an overall general sense of physical and mental well-being.
There is a groundswell in neuropsychological research that says increasing safeness in our nervous systems eases and bolsters our complex evolutionary path in our modern world.
When we practice mindfulness, we direct our attention to our current moment over and over again. Every mindfulness exercise (whether a formal sit-down type meditation, practicing a movement meditation, or an informal mindful stance while living our lives) is in its essence this redirection to the present moment. One of the major benefits of exercising our attention and brains in these ways is that we increase our psychological flexibility. When learning to cultivate more mindful moments, the aim is to adopt a stance where we allow what is currently happening around us and inside of us to simply be as it is, without trying to change it or identifying too much with it. Here there is an ongoing practice of shifting from a ‘doing’ frame of mind to a ‘being’ frame of mind.
By learning to be present and accepting in our daily lives, we get to live more fully, be present in each moment, and accept with joy and wonder the arising and unfolding of our days. I have found that integrating some amount of mindfulness and CFT framework into treatment represent powerful interventions that help clients find and maintain a balanced sense of self.
Unwind familiar and rigid narratives and patterns to start moving forward.
* As described by Dr. Kabat-Zinn in 1990
** Founder of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction clinic in Massachusetts
Emotion-Focused, Internal Family Systems
and Psychodynamic Psychotherapy
Historically, modern talk therapy has its roots in Freudian psychoanalytic therapy. Modern psychodynamic therapy is a longer-term approach that is characterized by a focus not only on the present-day situation, but also looks at how important past relationships and events inform the present. The clinical theory here suggest that we often recreate dynamics that we learned many years ago with key relational experiences. These dynamics, which are formed in our early years and often subconsciously carried with us, can make us rigid in the ways we relate and think about ourselves, others, and the world. One lens to use with these early and powerful shaping relationships is our safeness and effectiveness in attachment style.
We often find that what worked in those earlier situations isn’t helpful now.
We can soften and rework our attachment patterns. Within the psychodynamic therapeutic relationship, being deeply, accurately, and compassionately known by another person (your therapist) is empowering. Collaborating in a secure attachment relationship in therapy is quite healing. Having more flexible patterns of relating helps us establish more effective ways of living, working, and loving. Even when I don’t explicitly use these psychotherapy approaches, I find that having been trained in psychodynamic and emotion-focused therapies helps me. I can understand and work with the narrative heart of people’s stories in more anchored and meaningful ways. This historically-informed viewpoint is especially helpful in my couples work.
Emotion-focused couples therapy is a well-constructed and robust approach with the most enduring change outcomes. Having more clarity on the legacies of our personal attachment histories in our relationships can ease a lot of tension in our lives. Couples are helped to identify and step out their vulnerability cycles they get caught in. EFT helps couples better express and meet their core needs and loosen painful interaction patterns.