LCSW, 7 years of experience
The symptoms and sensations of post-traumatic stress, anxiety, grief, and depression can often feel debilitating, and may leave us bereft of hope that things will ever get better. My main goal and focus is to facilitate healing and collaborate with clients to carve out a path towards a greater sense of inner peace, meaning, and connection. I find that cultivating psychological flexibility and emotional regulation will often facilitate this endeavor and aim to guide and support my clients to this end. I embrace an eclectic approach to psychotherapy, borrowing from multiple traditions and theories of treatment. I tend to use psychodynamic, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. I am a strong advocate of integrative psychology and finding creative solutions to life's challenges and stressors.
Our first session together will consist of identity verification, confirmation of appropriateness for a telehealth level of care, administrative "housekeeping", eliciting a clinical history, and then exploring the specific challenges you're facing. We will then identify your treatment goals and create a plan moving forward.
I believe my greatest strengths in this work are my curiosity, empathy, and ability to communicate complex ideas into simpler terms.
I am best positioned to treat adults suffering from anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress, and those managing grief / loss.
I am a Certified Diplomate of CBT with the Academy of Cognitive and Behavioral Therapies. With this approach I endeavor to help clients recognize distorted thinking, maladaptive beliefs, or unhelpful behavioral patterns that are creating or exacerbating emotional distress. From there, we learn to challenge, reevaluate, and reframe these thoughts or beliefs to better reflect reality, and doing so from a perspective that emphasizes self-compassion.
I use ACT to help clients learn how to better respond to unwanted thoughts and feelings and learn radical acceptance in response to the inherent distress of the human experience. ACT may include value identification and engagement, exposure techniques, and thought diffusion (learning to "create space" between us and our thoughts). I ultimately use this approach to help clients normalize their emotional response to loss, stress, and trauma, and identify their core values that speak to a greater sense of meaning and purpose.
This approach elicits feedback and understanding about early life experiences, dynamics with primary caregivers (including but not limited to biological parents), and how these experiences subsequently impact relationships with the self and others. This approach aims to improve understanding of unconscious drives, self defense mechanisms, and attachment styles / dynamics.
This CBT based approach emphasizes cognitive exposure to traumatic events and situations, which is facilitated through the use of recurrent journaling prompts, narratives, and processed via Socratic questioning. This approach emphasizes identifying, exploring, and challenging any maladaptive core beliefs that emerged as a result of traumatic situations and events.
I use DBT to help clients improve emotional regulation, interpersonal relationships, and an impaired sense of identity. This approach tends to be more directive and relies heavily on skill building, psychoeducation, and consistent homework between sessions.