My approach to counseling and psychotherapy is both holistic and individualized. I combine therapies and techniques to address mental, emotional, spiritual, relational, and physical aspects of my clients concerns. I draw from several theories and types of therapy that I have found to be most effective in getting to the root cause of issues and facilitating deep healing and change. A unique plan of psychotherapy is determined for each client that is specific to that clients’ needs and goals. Traditional talk therapy is the basis for my treatment. Expressive arts therapies are intertwined as appropriate, along with Mind-Body therapies.
Talk Therapy
My style of Traditional Talk Therapy is influenced by Psychodynamic, Attachment, and Interpersonal theories of psychology. I believe that healthy, intimate, and satisfying relationships with others and with one’s self are at the core of living a content and meaningful life. The capacity to form and sustain these healthy relationships is the underlying goal of treatment. The safe space I create for clients provides a holding environment that allows them to gradually tell their story and explore patterns of relationship, behavior, thinking, or coping that are not serving them well. This allows for insight, growth, healing, and change. The container created by the therapeutic relationship ultimately allows for a healthier self to naturally emerge.
Sandtray Therapy
“Often the hands know how to solve a riddle with which the intellect has wrestled in vain.”
C. G. Jung
Sandtray therapy is a hands-on way of working with the psyche. It is a powerful therapeutic technique that facilitates the psyche’s natural capacity for healing.
In a “free and protected” space, clients create a concrete manifestation of their imaginal world using sand and miniature figures. In this way Sandtray helps honor and illuminate the client’s internal symbolic world and provides a place for its expression within a safe container. Sandtray therapy is done in conjunction with talk therapy during the therapeutic process, and is often beneficial when previous talk therapy has not “worked” very well, or when a client has become “stuck” in talk therapy.
Through the tangible emergence of personal and archetypal symbols, working in the Sandtray has the possibility of leading a client into layers of experience that are often pre-verbal and long forgotten to the conscious mind. With sufficient time and understanding, this experience can lead to the development of deep healing and profound change.
Sandtray therapy allows clients the opportunity to portray, rather than verbalize, feelings and experiences often inaccessible and/or difficult to express in words. A basic premise of Sandtray therapy is that the psyche possesses a natural tendency to heal itself, given the proper conditions. Similar to how our physical wounds heal under beneficial conditions, the psyche also has an instinctual wisdom that emerges when left free to operate naturally in a protected environment.
Brainspotting Therapy
Brainspotting is a profoundly deep and effective method of healing that works with both the mind and body. It is body-based, while also focuses on the processing of emotions and memories. This therapeutic technique began as an offshoot of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). Through bilateral stimulation of each hemisphere of the brain, disturbing memories and painful emotions can often be quickly reduced or eliminated, while resources are accessed and engaged within the client. Brainspotting is noninvasive and gentle. It harnesses the brain and nervous system’s ability to “unwind” and then resolve problems and process events. The combination of attunement between therapist and client, use of eye position, and body location of activation all allows for deep processing, relief, and new awareness around even long-standing issues. This makes Brainspotting a tool that can dramatically decrease depression, anxiety, overwhelming anger, complicated grief, and the effects of traumatic or difficult experiences.
The Newtown – Sandy Hook Community Foundation, Inc. recently released findings from its third annual community survey. Brainspotting was found to be the most efficacious of all treatment methods used in Newtown / Sandy Hook.
“Brainspotting is based on the profound attunement of the therapist with the patient, finding a somatic cue and extinguishing it by down-regulating the amygdala. It isn’t just PNS (Parasympathetic Nervous System) activation that is facilitated, it is homeostasis.” Robert Scaer, M.D. The Trauma Spectrum.