Why I Started My Practice

I have worked in community mental health, college counseling, on an interdisciplinary chronic pain treatment team, in short- and long-term inpatient psychiatric units, and in a large academic medical center. The goal of all these settings is to provide psychiatric care for people who want or need it, but the overwhelming majority of these facilities were under-resourced and relied heavily on the “medical model”. This model proposes that there is something wrong with the patient and it is the doctor’s job to evaluate and fix them. I turned down the opportunity to work with the psychiatry department at a renowned academic medical center because the evidence says differently: collaborative therapeutic treatment works better. 

​

Healing is possible with adequate resources and expert care. Intense feelings can be a strength if you have the right tools to help regulate them. The approach to mental health treatment in the United States is broken. It's a "reactive" model, built on the idea of treating symptoms once they become unmanageable instead of addressing the original trauma before it becomes catastrophic. 

​

We can do both. We can explore and process trauma AND help you with managing your symptoms. The processing piece of therapy is done psychodynamically, which looks like talking about how comfortable you are with me and what is or is not going well. The symptom-management piece is body-focused. Trauma is held in the body, so I use body-based interventions for managing body-based symptoms.

Most importantly, we will not move forward in talking about trauma until a foundation of trust and safety is established. The literature on psychotherapy shows that the most important factor in therapy is the therapeutic relationship. You're not coming to therapy to "fix things," you're coming to therapy to work with me to co-regulate emotions and process together. 

​