(she/her)
I am fortunate to have the chance to serve my clients. Therapy takes bravery and difficult work and I am so often amazed at their persistence, creative responses of life dilemmas and growth. I have done this work for longer than most therapists
Strength-Based
Strength-Based Therapy focuses on aiding you in identifying your positive attributes and empowering you to use these strengths to make progress on the goals that you have come to therapy to achieve. It is the underlying tenet of any of the treatment methods that this therapist uses.
Schema Therapy
The basic notion of schema therapy is that our life experiences set us up to engage in adaptive but also some maladaptive patterns of thinking. Schemas include our beliefs about ourselves and others, as well as about our understanding about life and the world as we see it. These beliefs are not necessarily in our conscious awareness until we work to recognize them. However, they greatly influence our ideas about ourselves, our behaviors and expectations in daily interactions, and the quality of our relationships. They can be the basis of our successes or the origin of our struggles. Schemas develop through our life experiences from the very start of our lives. The aim of schema therapy is to help you to recognize the underlying causes of your behaviors so that you can be empowered to gain access to your strengths, develop new skills, and change thoughts and behaviors that are interfering with your contentment, personal growth, and success.
Cognitive Behavioral (CBT)
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is one of the most common and best-studied forms of psychotherapy. It can help manage mental health conditions, such as depression and anxiety, and emotional concerns, such as coping with grief, stress, and anger. It is helpful for many issues, such as in the treatment of bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), eating disorders, panic disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD.) During CBT, the focus is on taking a close look at your thoughts and emotions to understand how your thoughts affect your actions. Through CBT, you can unlearn negative thoughts and behaviors and learn to adopt healthier thinking patterns. You will learn to respond differently to your thoughts with healthier behaviors.
Trauma Informed Care
When we have experienced trauma. therapy needs to include assessment of the impact of that trauma on our current day-to-day functioning. Trauma-informed care is an approach to treatment that acknowledges the impact of trauma on a person's mental, physical, and spiritual health. The pathway to healing is: 1) Understand the impact of trauma and possible paths to recovery 2) Identify and recognize signs, symptoms, and effects of trauma 3) Develop coping skills through the use of researched treatments such as mindfulness, relaxation techniques, bilateral processing as in EMDR, planned interactional responses, expressive arts.