Therapy can be many things to many people, and each therapist has their own style and approach. I take a “depth-oriented” perspective, which does lend itself to longer-term work, focused on the roots of longstanding issues, rather than solely on symptom relief. I try to purposefully integrate modern neurobiologically informed approaches with classical psychodynamic approaches.

Attachment-Focused and Relational:
I start with a mutual acknowledgment of the criticality of both childhood and adult attachment styles, and also honor the research showing that the relationship between client and therapist is the most critical factor for successful therapy.

Somatically-Grounded:
I was a bodyworker many years ago, and it gave me unique insights into how trauma and emotional patterns are held in the body. Contemporary research bears out the link between brain, mind, and body, and working somatically let’s us access stored defensive patterns in a way that lets them finally resolve. It also enables us to work with patterns stored in regions of the brain that express through sensation and image, rather than words.

Brain-Based and Neurobiologically-Informed:
Modern neuroscience has had a profound effect on trauma therapy, beginning with Dan Siegel’s Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB). While I certainly don’t aspire to be a neuroscientist, I strive to train with teachers whose frameworks are based on very recent brain-based research into how best to engage the brain and nervous system for effective trauma healing.

Psyche and Soul:
The movement towards establishing psychology as a “hard” science (think cognitive and behavioral models) led to most academic researchers and clinicians abandoning core human principles, such as the soul, the Self, and the spirit. I can fully appreciate that these concepts are not the sort of things to be measured in research studies and academic labs, but they lie at the roots of human healing (which goes beyond the psychological), and have since the birth of humankind. I highly value the science of psychology, but I also believe that trauma and psychedelic-assisted therapies, in particular, can be a sort of soul recovery, and ignoring the deepest and most transcendental parts of the human experience is counterproductive for doing real depth work. So while we may use behavioral models like ACT, you should also feel entirely comfortable bringing myth, dreams, and belief to our time together.