My Approach to Helping
Do you have an adept ability to flex and bend to the needs of your environment? Do you struggle to identify and prioritize your own needs? Are your goals and dreams collecting dust while you compulsively tend to those around you? Codependency often develops in the personality structures of people who are raised in chaotic and neglectful environments as children. A finely tuned childhood survival strategy, it leaves many in adulthood feeling a complex array of emotions in their adulthood: emptiness, resentment, loneliness, creative atrophy, and confusion. It's automatic and deeply painful.
I blend a number of therapeutic orientations to help you renegotiate your preoccupation with others, and bring that energy home to yourself.
More Info About My Practice
I supervise clinicians in training and also teach philosophy and clinical practice at local Masters in Counseling Psychology programs. I implement psycho-education in my practice with clients, acting as guide while you become your own expert.
My initial goal as a therapist is to help you mitigate any overwhelming mental and emotional symptoms you are experiencing. I use Somatic and Experiential interventions to help resolve traumatic patterning. Talk Therapy alone, although very helpful, rarely supports a body-mind that is stuck in chronic hyper or hype arousal (anxiety and depression).
I grew up white-bodied in a multi-ethnic, multi-racial environment that was essentially embattled in race wars. My healing practice includes a life-long study on the impacts of colonization and civilization trauma, and I am personally invested in movements that seek reparations, justice, and healing for historically and presently marginalized populations.
My View on the Nature of 'Disorders'
We are complex. We live in an atomized culture that increasingly aggravates are biological longing for safe and consistent connection, a capitalistic system that erodes our spiritual search for meaning, a colonized world where bodies are valued and undervalued based on archaic and cruel systems designed to exploit and control, a global ecosystem that is buckling under extraction, going hotter, less predictable, and out of control. Many of us have forgotten the land beneath our feet, where humans roamed and gathered and worshipped and sang and danced and lived in small, intimate groups for the vast majority of our evolutionary development. Most of us have forgotten who we are and what we are capable of, aside from ego-driven goals of capitalistic achievement, which often leave us feeling empty and confused once accomplished. We walk around masked, dislocated, and disoriented by digital addictions, which at this point are almost compulsory to function in daily society. The grief is unbearable and locked under a collective numb-scape, denial, myriad distractions, and more addictions. Meanwhile, we carry internal wounds from family, from individual traumas, that continue to keep us isolated, in states of threat, chronic anxiety and protection. People are searching for a diagnosis to explain what is happening to them, the chronic overwhelm, the symptoms that plague them daily. Of course they are. And of course, these labels can help, but they do not contain the answers to people's problems. The answer is in finding ways to remember and live in our wholeness, acts of resistance and reconnection with self and other. My life long training is figuring out how to help people do this in a "clinical" setting.
