Individual Counseling
Focused on YOU and your needs.I hear you.
Do any of these sound like you?
- Are you uncomfortable putting yourself out there?
- Freak out on the inside when you don’t perform well?
- Do ya to take care of others and under consider yourself?
- Do you feel like you are not allowed to be you?
- Do you have to fight to be considered?
- Do you have to earn A’s, have a sexy girlfriend, be super clever, earn lots of money, be the perfect mother, etc in order to be worthwhile?
- Do you feel like you ARE bad when you ask for what you want?
I am here to help!
Helping You Find Success With Personalized Counseling
Feel Like It’s Time to Make a Change in Your Life, But Can’t Seem to Find a Way?
Everyone’s nervous system and sense of self develops adaptive strategies to handle the hard, messy, sometimes fucked-up things in life. But we all end up overusing those strategies long after they’re needed. Real change comes from rewiring the brain so your nervous system can heal and you can operate from your grounded Self instead of your strategic, hurt parts. You’re not alone. There is a path toward transformation that works.
Individual Therapy can help if?
If you are in a life transition in your relationship or at work
Change happens. Learning how to shift into your solid, clear, grounded Self makes all the difference in handling real-life frustrations.
If you do not feel comfortable in your own skin
Let’s rediscover the real you beneath the layers of wounded parts that have been overreacting to past stressors in the present.
If you find it difficult to tell people what you really think and feel due to a fear of rejection,
When it’s hard to express what you truly think or feel because you fear rejection, that fear is usually a protective part—not your grounded Self. Learning to shift out of that part and into your grounded Self will change everything.
If you find it difficult to be who you are in a relationship, etc.
Do you have to avoid conflict or fight to be heard?
I also help people re-wire their emotional blue-prints that set them up for life challenges.
Your blueprints for how you relate to the world were shaped by your parents, early partners, family, religion, gender roles, cultural norms, and the people who mattered most. Even when they loved you, they also impacted you. Those early experiences developed strategic patterns in your brain—protective parts that helped you deal with some of the bullshit, as well as strategic selves that stayed on alert, constantly anticipating and trying to prevent those painful experiences from happening again. These strategies were essential for getting you through your early life, but they can also create pain now. Maybe you became a perfectionist. Maybe you learned you have to perform for love in order to feel “okay.” Maybe you shut down emotionally and people have trouble getting close to you.
I firmly believe that your depression, anxiety, excessive worry, and challenges in forming relationships and partnerships are rooted both in insufficient emotional attunement in your formative years and in the overcompensating protective strategies you developed to survive that lack of attunement. Your contribution to your present suffering—the part you can shift—is learning how to move out of those adaptive strategies and into your core Self, which no longer needs those old protections.
Therapy is not just a place to vent safely — it’s a place to learn how to transform your heart, your nervous system, and shift into your Self rather than the programmed patterns that set you up for suffering.
In individual therapy with me, in addition to being empathic and kind while helping you navigate the painful transitions that bring you in, I help you internalize a felt sense of acceptability and learn how to shift into your grounded Self rather than the maladaptive patterns you inherited for dealing with the world’s imperfections. This helps you recognize which self is showing up in the moment and empowers you to choose the grounded, capable version of you who can meet life’s dilemmas without collapsing into old survival strategies.
My Approach
When you work with me, we’ll be working on three interconnected levels:
1 — Healing and stabilizing your nervous system
We focus on reducing hypervigilance and settling the fight–flight–freeze responses that get triggered by present-day situations. As your nervous system becomes more grounded and regulated, you become far more capable of emotional learning, and your anxiety decreases naturally.
2 — Shifting the self you operate from
We work on the level of Self by helping you learn how to differentiate between the adaptive, fragmented coping mechanisms you inherited from your culture, upbringing, and conditioning—and the deeper Self that doesn’t carry those challenges. You’ll learn how to identify, find, and shift into that grounded Self, and stabilize living from it even in imperfect circumstances, whether in relationships, work, or the world.
3 — Healing attachment wounds through internalizing worthiness
You’ll begin to internalize, somatically, a felt sense of worthwhileness—first by receiving attunement and acceptance from me, and then by learning how to direct your own empathic presence toward yourself. You won’t just receive corrective emotional experiences; you’ll learn how to generate them internally so your sense of worth becomes stable and embodied.
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Some people love geeking out on learning which therapeutic modalities heal which kinds of wounds. If so, feel free to click on the following links for more detailed, overly extensive descriptions of the modalities I use for this work.
(You don’t have to understand any of this for therapy to be helpful. This is just for people who enjoy understanding how therapy works.)
- EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) & The Flash Technique
- Re-Creation of the Self (RCS)
- Attachment-Based Therapy
- Somatically Informed Psychodynamic Therapy (Hakomi)
