“We are adaptive rather than disordered”
-Bonnie Badenoch
Balance Through Befriending
Therapeutic techniques play a key role in healing. Together, we will find what works best for you. However, even more important than the techniques is our relationship and how you relate to yourself. I demonstrate how to befriend yourself by accepting you exactly as you are, of course, hoping for you to feel better but not expecting you to change. Every technique we agree to use serves the goal of helping you increase awareness and befriend your own experience. Lasting, meaningful change comes through befriending and accepting yourself. Only then can the techniques we use truly be effective.
Trauma Sensitive Therapy
I understand trauma as something that can be both inherited across generations and experienced directly through overwhelming events like accidents, injuries, or assaults. But trauma isn’t always loud or obvious; developmental trauma, which affects nearly all of us, often comes from repeated experiences like emotional neglect, judgment, or feeling unseen. Whether trauma shows up in subtle or more severe ways, healing begins by acknowledging its impact and gently working with the protective strategies you’ve developed, such as dissociation, avoidance, addiction, or hypervigilance. Rather than trying to eliminate these responses, we build compassionate awareness around them, allowing you to make more empowered, moment-to-moment choices in how you relate to yourself and the world. Through processing traumatic memories with befriending and approaches like EMDR, Brainspotting, and somatic awareness, the nervous system is given the opportunity to fully complete what was once overwhelming, often allowing the trauma to feel resolved and significantly reducing, or even eliminating, its ongoing emotional and physiological impacts.
Attachment Centered Therapy
Infants and young children rely on caregivers for emotional and physiological regulation because they cannot yet regulate on their own. They borrow their caregivers’ nervous systems, and through consistent attunement, being seen, soothed, and responded to, they gradually develop this capacity themselves. When misattunement such as judgment, neglect, misunderstanding, shame, or unnecessary rescuing happens repeatedly without repair, attachment wounds can form. Chronic misattunement leads to dysregulation, and children adapt in whatever ways they can to find stability, internally or relationally, patterns that may later feel uncomfortable or distancing. When these adaptations form early, they become deeply wired. These wounds shape our identity, our expectations of others, and how we move through relationships. Because attachment is foundational to survival, disruptions in connection can impact the nervous system as deeply as more overt traumas. Attachment trauma can occur not only with caregivers but also with friends, partners, family members, or even in one’s relationship with a higher power. Healing requires more than insight. It involves tending to these relational wounds through new corrective experiences so we do not unconsciously repeat old patterns and can move toward more secure and connected ways of being.
Somatic Based Approach
While verbal processing is an important part of our sessions, we will also gently explore your internal experience through a bottom-up, somatic approach. Together, we focus on cultivating a felt and embodied sense of what it is like to be you in this moment without pushing for somatic awareness or performance. We honor dissociation in the many ways it shows up, understanding it as an intelligent and protective response rather than something to override. This work emphasizes the deep connection between mind and body, drawing on awareness of sensation, breath, movement, and choice to support healing. If you want, supportive touch can be integrated as a powerful resource for compassion, grounding, and connection. Throughout our work together, you are always in charge. This process is about reconnecting with your body’s innate wisdom in a way that feels safe, respectful, empowering, and aligned with your pace.
Time-Intensive Therapy
Time-intensive therapy offers a spacious and uninterrupted container for deeper healing by moving beyond the limitations of traditional 50-minute sessions, where it can be hard to build momentum and easy to lose it just as meaningful work begins. With longer sessions, the therapeutic process can unfold more naturally, allowing us to slow down in ways that signal safety to the nervous system, an essential foundation for healing and integration. This unhurried pace gives you the time and space to stay connected to your emotions, insights, and inner experiences without feeling rushed, fragmented, or cut off. Research in the field shows that when therapy happens in longer or more concentrated blocks, people often make progress more quickly, especially with trauma, anxiety, and depression, because the brain has more uninterrupted time to process, integrate, and settle.
This extended format allows for the thoughtful integration of modalities such as EMDR, Brainspotting, sandtray, parts work, somatic approaches, and expressive arts—approaches that are most effective when there is sustained focus and a slower, more embodied pace. With modalities like EMDR and Brainspotting in particular, longer sessions create more space for deeper resolution of traumatic memories and the ability to process multiple targets within a single session. Intentional integration pauses built into the process support grounding, nourishment, and nervous-system regulation, helping the work land more fully and with greater coherence. For clients who travel to see me, intensives reduce the need for frequent trips by consolidating therapy into fewer visits while maintaining depth and continuity. Overall, intensive therapy creates a steady, regulated environment that supports meaningful progress and allows healing to unfold with greater depth, safety, and continuity. Intensive therapy sessions can range from 2 to 6 hours. If you’re curious about what length might be the best fit for your needs, I invite you to schedule a consultation so we can explore it together.