Are you curious about the impact of your past on your present? Are you curious about your relationship patterns and choices? Do you often feel misunderstood or invalidated? Do you feel seen and valued for who and how you are? Are you interested in desire, liberation and an expansion of your worldview? I have deep, personal connections to these pathways of inquiry and reflection and am interested in engaging in this work with others. I am a psychotherapist who is passionately committed to individual, collective and community wellness. I believe that relationships are the site of both injury and transformation. Our relationship will provide a space for connection, safety and recovery. I work from a person and culture centered, psychodynamic/depth perspective and understand suffering as trans-generational, racial, cultural and personal/interpersonal. I approach "problems" as ineffective solutions or "symptoms" as expressing what we cannot with words. Our work will be to locate those words. And speak them.
What can clients expect to take away from sessions with you?
Initially, we will explore your goals and priorities for therapy, experience with past therapies . We will collaborate to create a vision of a preferred future, based in the foundation of your personal and cultural values. We will collaborate to make meaning from potentially disconnected experiences that may increase your emotional regulation, flexibility and tolerance for holding tension and complexity with decreased defensive rigidity.
What treatment methods and tools do you utilize?
Treatment methods and tools are very individualized.I do have a basic relational, psychodynamic approach, which means that I believe in the Unconscious and that early experience shapes our subjectivity, or sense of self in relation to others. While this is the very general treatment frame, I also utilize practical, skill oriented, life enhancing treatment tools such as mindfulness based stress reduction, wellness and recovery action planning, a focus on identifying and accessing ancillary community resources. I use an integrated, trauma informed and developmental lens to attune to somatic and physiological corroborations with limiting belief systems, overvalued ideas and negatively reinforcing self- narratives.
Explain to clients what areas you feel are your biggest strengths.
I often work well with folks who have not had a positive or effective experience with therapy in the past or are dubious about psychotherapy in general. There are many barriers to therapeutic change and these barriers are often on the side of the therapist, not the client, who is often blamed for it. I worked well with folks that have been pathologized, socially ostracized, sexually villianized, racialally criminalized and harmed by institutional white supremacy .