Areas of Specialty Training
Trauma, Grief, and Loss
"I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become." -Carl Jung
Being exposed to traumatic situations and experiencing significant loss can completely disrupt how you show up in your life, both for others around you and yourself. Whether the trauma you have endured involved physical or sexual assault, intimate partner violence, childhood abuse and/or neglect, direct or indirect combat, witnessing or learning of the death of a loved one, or a combination of these, its impact can lead you to disengage from life to try to cope with the pain. Deliberately trying to block out the pain of what happened, however, ends up having the unintended effect of numbing out positive emotions and intruding on your daily life. Over time, this continued pattern of disconnecting from a natural range of emotions associated with the pain of trauma can lead to a loss of meaning to the point that the trauma ends up taking control over what was once a life you chose.
Trauma-focused therapy can help in such a way that the trauma imprinted on your psyche is no longer taking control over your life, and you're instead capitalizing on posttraumatic growth. Trauma work is both difficult and incredibly meaningful, and there are multiple relevant therapeutic approaches we can further discuss. These include:
Being exposed to traumatic situations and experiencing significant loss can completely disrupt how you show up in your life, both for others around you and yourself. Whether the trauma you have endured involved physical or sexual assault, intimate partner violence, childhood abuse and/or neglect, direct or indirect combat, witnessing or learning of the death of a loved one, or a combination of these, its impact can lead you to disengage from life to try to cope with the pain. Deliberately trying to block out the pain of what happened, however, ends up having the unintended effect of numbing out positive emotions and intruding on your daily life. Over time, this continued pattern of disconnecting from a natural range of emotions associated with the pain of trauma can lead to a loss of meaning to the point that the trauma ends up taking control over what was once a life you chose.
Trauma-focused therapy can help in such a way that the trauma imprinted on your psyche is no longer taking control over your life, and you're instead capitalizing on posttraumatic growth. Trauma work is both difficult and incredibly meaningful, and there are multiple relevant therapeutic approaches we can further discuss. These include:
Behavioral Medicine
The field of behavioral medicine focuses on treating medical conditions that are exacerbated by stress and other psychological factors by using multiple behavioral health techniques. The field also specializes in the treatment of conditions that are associated with particular behaviors, habits and lifestyle factors. My subspecialties within behavioral medicine include:
- Perinatal mental health
- Sleep difficulties
- Chronic pain or illness
- Tobacco/nicotine addiction
- Interpersonal Psychotherapy for Reproductive Mental Health (IPT-RMH)
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I)
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Chronic Pain (CBT-CP)
- Motivational Interviewing (MI)
- Behavioral counseling for nicotine addiction and difficulty with adherence to Positive Airway Pressure (PAP) therapy
Depression and Anxiety
Depression and anxiety often show up together and in many different ways across physical ailments, behaviors, thinking patterns, and emotions like excessive guilt, apathy, shame, self-doubt, anger/irritability, nervousness, or helplessness. Perhaps things have gotten to a point where life feels dull or empty, like it has lost its meaning or like you're a failure to yourself and your loved ones. Thoughts of being better off dead or of killing yourself in some way could even linger around in your mind because you feel so overwhelmed at times that you can't see a way out. These experiences often come to the surface in the midst of significant biological, social, work, and/or relational stressors, which may be an initial focus of our sessions until we uncover potential deeper roots of your pain.
Often times I find with my clients struggling with anxiety that the anxiety in and of itself is not problematic, since science and evolution both show us that anxiety, when experienced in moderation, is actually necessary and healthy for us in order to function optimally. What is often problematic is our relationship with anxiety when it shows up; that is, the automatic resistance in the form of thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations that we get hooked into is what causes us to suffer from it as it keeps us from living and engaging in our lives fully. Accordingly, my approach is to help you really get to know your anxiety instead of continuing to find ways to control or avoid it, so you can promote a healthier, more accepting relationship with yourself and realize you are more powerful and resilient than you ever believed before. There are multiple approaches I am trained in to be able to best help you navigate these processes, similar to those already mentioned above (e.g., IPT, EMDR, ACT, CBT, MBCT), that we can talk about in further detail together.
Often times I find with my clients struggling with anxiety that the anxiety in and of itself is not problematic, since science and evolution both show us that anxiety, when experienced in moderation, is actually necessary and healthy for us in order to function optimally. What is often problematic is our relationship with anxiety when it shows up; that is, the automatic resistance in the form of thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations that we get hooked into is what causes us to suffer from it as it keeps us from living and engaging in our lives fully. Accordingly, my approach is to help you really get to know your anxiety instead of continuing to find ways to control or avoid it, so you can promote a healthier, more accepting relationship with yourself and realize you are more powerful and resilient than you ever believed before. There are multiple approaches I am trained in to be able to best help you navigate these processes, similar to those already mentioned above (e.g., IPT, EMDR, ACT, CBT, MBCT), that we can talk about in further detail together.
