Therapy with Me

I find my clients tend to incorporate the work done in therapy into their daily lives more successfully when they understand how their brain processes information, how their symptoms or behaviors attempt to protect them, and how coping or regulation skills work to reduce distress or discomfort. Understanding the function of our behaviors creates a path for sustainable change, because it allows us to make more choices about how we respond or regulate. 
 

I work from a harm reduction & trauma-informed perspective, meaning higher-risk coping skills are gradually replaced with lower-risk or more sustainable coping skills and at the client's own pace, with awareness and compassion for how stressful & traumatic experiences in the past inform how we respond and cope in the present. 

Evidence-based practices & theories I tend to use include dialectical-behavioral therapy and humanistic/existential therapy, motivational interviewing and solution-focused practices, and experiential therapy practices. I'm also able to provide Brainspotting as a trauma intervention and will continue to increase my skills in this modality.

Helping clients identify tools & learning how to use them often means adapting my approach to my clients' learning styles and their in-the-moment needs. Art, movement, stimming & sensory engagement, and mindfulness may all be part of the process.

My Values

My values are grounded in an anti-oppressive perspective, always keeping in mind how power structures impact us through oppressive social systems & in relationships with power imbalances. I'm an anti-capitalist abolitionist who is constantly working to learn more about systemic harm & unlearning how I may perpetuate racism, ableism, classism, and fatphobia.

I am aware of how my experiences of privilege - through my whiteness, my education, my relative financial privilege, and my ability to “pass” as cisgender - can & do impact my interactions with others, and how being a therapist inherently places me in a position of power. It’s important (and necessary) that I acknowledge these aspects of myself and constantly work to mitigate the harm that those types of privilege & power can cause. 

My work is also grounded in my own experiences of marginalization & how those experiences inform my interactions with the world. I’m autistic & ADHD; I’m queer & trans; I’ve experienced chronic depression & anxiety for much of my life, and have struggled with addiction; I grew up poor & have significant student debt. These experiences have helped me understand on a deep level how individual suffering starts and is perpetuated at a systemic level.

Systemic oppression is by design - we cannot cope or self-care our way out of the harm we experience because of systemic oppression, but we can develop skills and have tools that help us survive, build community, and experience joy.