How I Work with You
I have been a seeker and I still am, but I stopped asking the books and the stars.
I started listening to the teaching of my soul.
~Rumi
Therapy is a time for YOU.
Therapy can help you in so many ways.
Let’s start with the understanding that you aren’t going to get this wrong. You can’t.
You are starting therapy because you want to get to know yourself more deeply. That’s a challenging thing to do on your own! On the way to gaining deep insight, you may have to move past things that make you uncomfortable.
That’s why I’m here.
I am here to guide you through the process. I work using a variety of tools, sometimes called orientations, to help get you where you want to go.
At the core, though, our work together is based on what works for you.
I approach you as an individual and work with you to see what feels best.
This is your unique journey; I’m a collaborator. Here are just a few of the orientation tools we can use as we travel this path together.
Somatic Therapy
In somatic therapy, we’ll listen to the story your body is telling. When you go through certain experiences, you carry them with you through both your conscious memories and things that you store in your body.
Why? Perhaps you were too young to have a fully conscious memory. Maybe you were stressed and didn’t have time to process things with your conscious mind. Or maybe you needed to push past the emotion to get the job done. There are so many reasons why the body stores what the mind cannot.
Somatic, or body-based, therapy considers the possibility that things that you have experienced may have affected more than what you can put into words.
Together, we’ll use somatic therapy in conjunction with talk therapy to come to a deeper understanding of the total you.
My somatic work is based on my years spent studying yoga and the subtle body. I also am influenced by Somatic Experiencing, Focusing, and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. Read more about somatic therapy here.
Transpersonal Therapy
The process of finding yourself often starts with feeling lost.
You realize something isn’t working, but you’re not sure what it is, let alone how to change it.
Transpersonal therapy integrates these larger questions of meaning, identity, and spirituality into the process. It looks at how to combine all the unique parts of you into an identifiable whole.
Transpersonal therapy integrates these larger questions of meaning, identity and spirituality into the process of therapy.
Depending on your personality and where you are in the journey, we may more actively work with a transpersonal lens. Spirituality, and my work studying Tibetan Buddhism (Gelugpa school), Vedanta, and Yoga, is an important part of my own path of healing. If incorporating this lens serves you, then we may also do so.
Relational Therapy
One of the ways you can may define your sense of self is in relation to other people.
Your relationships and the various forms they take cannot help but impact you significantly. Some relationships have strengthened you, but others have been part of creating obstacles that you need to overcome.
The therapeutic relationship (i.e., the relationship that develops between you and me) is itself part of the healing of these challenges. Wounds that resulted from relationships can only heal through other relationships.
I’ll work to develop trust between us – I never take that for granted. When we’ve established trust, safety, and openness between us, we make room for a lot of healing to occur.
Psychodynamic Therapy
Why do you do the things that you do?
Have you ever really given much thought to it? Why do you feel that your career choice is a good one? Or what specific qualities attracted you to your partner?
Psychodynamic therapy involves the process of making many of these unconscious choices conscious. When you work psychodynamically, you understand that where you are in the present has been influenced by the past.
The choices you have made, the actions that you take – even the ones that you don’t – make sense, absolute sense, if you realize they originated to protect you at some point.
I deeply respect your autonomy, and we’ll gear our work toward whether you still need the coping strategies that you adopted at one point, rather than seeing them as shameful or bad. For example, you may have adopted different strategies to process trauma in your past. If we realize you no longer need those strategies, we’ll strive to adopt new ones.
Ready to embark on a journey toward your best self?
I’m ready to be your guide. Reach out to me to schedule an appointment today.