My Story
I grew up in a home with a severely mentally ill and abusive father. I was never educated on how healthy relationships look or work. Because of this, I ended up recreating a lot of the trauma I experienced in my childhood throughout my life. Despite having gone to counseling almost daily for over a year in my teens, I never learned the skills to stop my cycles of trauma. It wasn't until I was in my master's program that I was able to identify just how much I didn't know about being a human!
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It took me a master's level education to learn about healthy relationships.
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My personal history heavily informs how I practice. It's not enough for us to just talk about past traumas, because if we're not learning how to do things differently going forward, we will continue to recreate old traumas in our futures. And since most trauma my clients experience is based in relationships, we have to start here.
My Practice: what's a session look like?
For every client I work with, we begin with goals you set. Why are you seeking service now? What do you hope to accomplish?
If you're seeing me for trauma processing, we'll look at if you've experienced a single event or a pattern of traumas. For single events, such as a car accident, we can most likely jump in and get you significant relief within a few sessions through EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing). For more complex-trauma, we will likely be hanging out with each other for a while.
With complex trauma, we will build out the timeline of your life, chart your traumas, identify themes within experiences and the beliefs you've developed because of these experiences, then identify the most important experiences to work with. I want us to better understand you as a whole human so we can help you heal and actualize holistically. For most clients, we will integrate some EMDR into session to process trauma and make meaning out of these experiences. EMDR can mute the emotional reactivity associated with traumatic events and often brings about an epiphany for the client. However, EMDR is not an appropriate tool in some situations, such as, if you struggle with intense dissociation.
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Trauma processing is not enough on its own though.
At the same time we process trauma, we're going to be teaching you new standards for relationships and we'll be practicing new skills to improve relationships. We're going to be looking at patterns of abuse and codependence, communication skills and boundary setting and enforcing. We're also going to teach you how to listen to your own body, identify your emotions and understand emotions as motivators for positive change. This is my (loosely named), "How to be a Human Starter Pack." This pack combines items from my resource page and handouts page.
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Not trying to process trauma? If you have ADHD/ASD, relationship struggles, parenting struggles, anxiety, depression, life changes, difficulty with work-life balance, or other mental health concerns not related to trauma, we can work with that too! I have specialized training to help get to the root of your concerns and teach you the skills to help you feel more in control of your own life.
We are holistic beings and the mind can't be separated from the body. Throughout our time working together, we will rule out any easy biological fixes like: getting sunshine, practicing good sleep hygiene, identifying deficiencies in any vitamins or hormone imbalances, and brainstorming diet and exercise changes. Holistic care may mean requesting specific tests from your PCP or you can work with providers I trust and collaborate with directly. Not interested in holistic care? That's okay too. You are the boss of our sessions and while things are going to get uncomfortable no matter what, you steer the course for our interventions.
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If you are looking for a counselor who just sits and listens to you talk for an hour, I'm not going to be the right person for you. I want to challenge you, even when it's uncomfortable for both of us, to see your own patterns and achieve your goals. That being said, I am always open (end even excited) when there is pushback and exchange between the two of us. At the heart of each session, you are the boss and are always empowered to set the pace, correct me or change directions. In this way, we can mitigate power dynamics and build trust and support.
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Contact
To book a session or to see if we're a good match, give me a call or send me an email~
720-334-2477