My Therapeutic Approach
As you may know from meeting with different therapists or reading therapists’ profiles, there are different ways to do therapy. There are multiple psychological theories that lead to different kinds of conversations in therapy and different ideas about what will lead to a desired goal.
I believe that you should be as informed as possible in your search for a therapist, which is why I want to explain a little bit about my theoretical orientation towards therapy.
My primary orientation toward therapy is a style called relational psychotherapy. I also integrate psychodynamic theory, trauma-informed therapeutic practices, and social justice and anti-oppressive frameworks.
Hakomi Mindfulness Based Somatic Therapy
Hakomi is a form of therapy that utilizes mindfulness to allow you to practice noticing thoughts, feelings, sensations in your body, memories, and beliefs in the present moment.
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Hakomi utilizes somatic interventions and techniques to support you in accessing the unconscious beliefs and meanings that you internalized from your experiences in your early life and formative relationships. Hakomi helps you to connect with those early beliefs and begin to heal the beliefs about yourself and the world that may no longer be true.
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Utilizing mindfulness helps you to experience and feel the transformation of past trauma and unmet developmental needs in ways that lead to healing and growth.
Trauma Informed
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Trauma is any experience that overwhelms our ability to cope in healthy ways. Trauma can result from a single overwhelming experience or from an accumulation of stressors. What is traumatic for one person may not be traumatic for another. Trauma is subjective.
Trauma affects the way our body perceives and responds to future and ongoing stress. Responses to trauma can often be experienced as anxiety, depression, social withdrawal, low self-esteem, and fear or pessimism about the future.
Trauma informed therapy is gradual and paced to allow clients to experience a sense of safety and agency. Traumatic experiences that were previously overwhelming can be processed and integrated. Over time, we can shift our bodily responses and develop more effective ways of coping and moving stress through our bodies.
Anti-Oppression
Experiences of systemic oppression are traumatic and can contribute to feelings of depression, anxiety, worthlessness, fatigue, rage, and shame. Systemic oppression, including white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, colonialism, and the economic system of capitalism, enact both physical and emotional violence and lead to the hoarding of resources and opportunities.
In therapy, it is important to name and acknowledge the reality of systemic oppression in order to validate the trauma caused by these systems.
As a therapist, I am committed to acknowledging the effects of systemic oppression on clients’ lives and working with clients to advocate for themselves and build community to challenge these systems. I am also committed to engaging in my own political activism to advocate for meaningful policy changes.
Relational Therapy ​
Relational therapy recognizes the importance of relationships for well-being and focuses on ways to enhance your ability to engage in authentic, meaningful, and fulfilling relationships.
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We all develop patterns and expectations in relationships from our experiences in our early, formative relationships. Our experiences in those early relationships are often internalized and contribute to our conscious and unconscious expectations about our worth and identity in relationships, how we engage in relationships, and how we expect others will respond to us in relationships.
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Relational therapy focuses on exploring and understanding what frameworks and patterns for relationships have been internalized and may be replicating themselves in your life. Relational therapy facilitates your ability to develop and internalize new relational frameworks that create new possibilities for meaningful connections.