Angela Dedenbach
I am a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist (LMFT) with a Master's in Counseling Psychology and a specialization in Expressive Arts Therapy. I provide Trauma-Informed care to individual adults and couples residing in the state of California.
I will often infuse our time together with humor, creativity, and offerings or insights to support you in deepening your awareness, restoring emotional and relational balance, and achieving an overall sense of ease and wellbeing.
I have been practicing since 2015, and have experience in hospital, private practice, and community mental health settings working with a wide range of populations. I believe my creativity and comprehensive training have been invaluable assets in supporting clients from all walks of life as they work to achieve their unique therapeutic goals.
First session
In the first session, we will complete a detailed mental health, substance use, and psychosocial history which will give me an idea of your lived experience, and how it may be impacting your current life challenges. Together, we will use this information to co-create a set of treatment goals that will provide a framework for our work moving forward.
Strengths
I hold a very genuine unconditional positive regard for all of my clients and believe all clients have within them the strengths and tools to create the life they wish to lead. I believe I am here to facilitate and gently guide that process. All parts of you are welcome in my therapy room, without judgement. I deeply listen, and work to build a strong rapport with my clients that allows them to feel safe and supported in the therapeutic relationship. I will often infuse our time together with humor, creativity, and offerings or insights to support you in deepening your awareness, restoring emotional and relational balance, and achieving an overall sense of ease and wellbeing.
Ideal clients
Currently my telehealth practice welcomes individual adults and adult couples who are open-minded and motivated for growth and change. I am also committed to supporting marginalized populations, and welcome LGBTQIA+ clients, BIPOC clients, clients living with disabilities, chronic illness, or terminal illness, and clients with "non-traditional" lifestyles. I currently offer telehealth only, and would not be a good fit for clients seeking in-person sessions.
Treatment methods
Mind-body approach
I use a Mind-body approach with all of my clients because I deeply believe therapy is most effective if it is addressing how the body and central nervous system are interacting with our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and beliefs. Using Mind-body therapy fosters holistic healing that uses breathwork, mindfulness based practices, and somatic awareness while also incorporating cognitive and thought-based frameworks and interventions. Using a mind-body approach has helped clients shift years of old patterning to create lasting change.
Attachment-based
Our earliest relationship attachments often shape our behavior in relationships later in life. Attachment-Based Therapy provides a framework for understanding the relationship between early-life attachments and current relationship dynamics. For my clients, understanding how our early life relationships impact mind and body helps them to identify what may be keeping them stuck in unhealthy or dysregulating patterns and relationships.
Trauma-Informed Care
Trauma is severe or life-threatening distress, and most people have experienced some form of trauma in their lives. Trauma may be acute, chronic, complex, medical, or historical in nature. It is vital to understand a client's experience of trauma and how it has impacted their nervous system, their emotional responses, and how it has shaped a client's current thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and beliefs. For my clients, deepening awareness of a their trauma, their triggers, and their automatic responses to these triggers helps them to more effectively manage reactivity and responses in future stressful situations. Clients are also invited to identify and explore how intergenerational trauma may be impacting their lived experience.
Cognitive Behavioral (CBT)
CBT explores the relationship between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and uses interventions that help clients track their own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in various life situations. CBT has helped my clients to identify false beliefs, cognitive distortions, and automatic thoughts about themselves, others, the future, or the world. CBT has helped my clients learn about unhelpful thought patterns, more clearly understand how beliefs are formed, and explore how cognitive distortions may be impacting their perspective. Once aware of these patterns, clients can then begin to shift their thinking and perspective to improve their relationships and outcomes.
Integrative
As a Master's graduate of California Institute of Integral Studies, I was trained as an Integrative therapist. Integrative therapy means that the therapist draws from multiple psychological/theoretical frameworks to create an individualized treatment plan for the client. For example, some sessions may focus on learning and integrating CBT or DBT skills, while some other sessions may focus more on processing early life relationships or trauma. Other sessions may focus on somatic awareness, compassion-based practices, or mindfulness based interventions. Using an integrative approach to treatment allows me to provide holistic healing for my clients, and provides a wider set of tools to address each client's specific emotional and physical needs.
Location
Virtual sessions