Our Approach
Therapy starts wherever you are. Whatever is on your mind, bothering you, or feeling stuck is where we will start our work. Together, we will build a therapeutic container that supports you to better understand yourself, process difficult emotions and past experiences, and live the life you want.
It begins with looking inside with curiosity towards our internal experience. Throughout our work we will look for the containers that allow us to be comfortably uncomfortable, and that support us to be present with aspects of our internal experience that have felt too difficult take a look at before now.
We believe healing happens as we learn to accept and love all parts of ourselves — including the parts that feel challenging, shameful, overwhelming, or hard to understand.
Because healing isn’t one size fits all, we integrate many approaches to build a therapeutic space that works for you. Some of these approaches come from the world of therapy theory and research, and some don’t. We find healing in a lot of places, and they all belong in therapy. We invite you to bring your wisdom, lived experience, and creativity to our work together.
Some of the lenses we draw in from the therapy world are listed below. We have found that these bottom-up modalities offer non-pathologizing, trauma-informed frameworks to get to know our internal somatic and emotional experience and support the cultivation of self understanding and self compassion.
Internal Family Systems therapy
IFS offers a framework for understanding our internal world as made up of different parts that may become burdened with protective roles or with carrying painful emotions and experiences. This non-pathologizing model understands these responses as trying to protect us, and invites us to get to know these different aspects and their positive intentions. Instead of trying to change or eliminate the parts of ourselves we struggle with, we learn to approach them with curiosity and compassion, relieve them of the burdens they are carrying, and restore trust in our Self.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
Our experiences are held not only in our thoughts and conscious memories, but also in our sensory experience, movements, posture, and nervous system responses. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy offers a set of tools to track our body’s patterns, learn to support our nervous system responses, and process emotions and difficult experiences through the language of the body. These techniques can be particularly helpful for people who have had overwhelming, traumatic, or early developmental experiences that have led to protective separation between everyday awareness and the memories, emotions, or embodied feelings associated with these experiences.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
EMDR supports the processing of experiences that keep us stuck in the past and influence our beliefs about ourselves and the world. By pairing bilateral stimulation with sustained attention to the challenging memory, EMDR can help experiences feel less overwhelming and allow the nervous system to recognize that what happened is no longer happening.