AREAS OF specialty
Family of origin
Early family dynamics play an important role in the way that you see yourself, others, and the world around you, and likely have a great impact on any patterning showing up in your life today. You may have been walking on eggshells to keep the peace, caretaking or acting as the parent to other family members, or simply always on alert and ready to put out fires, focusing on everyone else but yourself. Whatever the circumstances, complex family dynamics can mean a loss of authenticity and opportunity to develop your true sense of self, your needs, and your values. An exploration of your family of origin can allow you to get in touch with your core wounds so that you can move past autopilot, reparent your inner child and move forward as the most enlivened version of you.
Self Discovery / self-esteem
If you weren’t given the opportunity to develop your sense of self, you may find that you are going through the motions completely disconnected from yourself, living for everybody else and their expectations of you. Together we will explore what a fulfilled, meaningful, and purpose-driven life looks like to you, understanding your strengths, needs, and dreams. In addition to such exploration, we will work on cleaning up your inner dialogue and softening any inner critic that may be getting in the way of your potential. Once you have developed clarity around what it looks like for you to really live for you in alignment with your highest self, this is when the most full, confident version of you can come forward.
Anxiety
Emotions live in the body and when unprocessed can become anxiety. This is especially common if your nervous systems has been hijacked into dysregulation due to chronic stress. Avoiding uncomfortable, unwanted emotional or physical experiences often feels like the easiest path forward, but what we push away comes roaring back with even more force. Oftentimes this looks like anxiety in various forms.
Our work will explore what it looks like to let go of trying to control our experience, of accepting and embracing ‘what is’ through mindfulness. We will step back to observe how your mind is running the show, and then sit with your bodily experience to understand what you’re really experiencing – not the story your mind is telling you. We will work towards building a trusting relationship between you and your body so that you can live in the presence of what is happening through you and in you, rather than existing in reactivity to what is happening to you.
Emotional regulation
In response to chronic stress or trauma, nervous system dysregulation can occur as energy becomes stuck in the body without any release valve. Your nervous system can end up silently running the show, entrapping you into shame-states, depressive episodes, compulsive behaviors. This, coupled with a lack of opportunity to learn how to thoroughly sit with ourselves and process our emotional experience – which lives in the body – can create real suffering through constant emotional dysregulation. Together we’ll explore strategies to help you find inner balance through nervous system regulation and practices that will allow you to sit peacefully with yourself as you ride the wave of uncomfortable emotions. Some ways we’ll do this include mindfulness, breathing exercises, vagus nerve exercises, and DBT skills.
Relationships
Do you find it hard to identify your needs and desires in relationship, let alone communicate them? You may be experiencing some level of codependency, in which it’s hard to distinguish where you end and the other person begins, which can also be described as the general feeling of “I’m not okay if you’re not okay.” Together we will help you get clear on and stand up for what it is that you want, need, and value in your relationship. We will work on maintaining healthy boundaries that allow your relationships to flourish rather than feed into resentment and the erosion of your authentic self. We will build awareness around your relational patterns from an attachment perspective, and then engage in the deep-inner work that will heal ‘attachment injury’ and explore what it looks like to operate from a place of empowerment and truth.
Eating disorders & body image
Complex and multifaceted, eating disorders can take root in a number of ways: societal messaging, comments we receive throughout our lifetime, perfectionism and a need for control, self-worth and the internalized belief that we need to look a certain way to be worthy of whatever it is we want, difficulty managing emotions and using food as a mechanism to soothe, the list goes on.
Somewhere along the way it’s likely that your eating disorder developed out of a need to survive and thrive, eventually working as a sort of safety mechanism. Together we will explore how the eating disorder developed, looking at the how and why of its operation and work to slowly cultivate a relationship back to your true Self and inner wisdom as the driver of your experience, not your eating disorder. Together we will explore what a life worth living beyond food and body obsession looks like for you because. I take an anti-diet, HAES (health at every size) approach.
“I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.”
— John O'Donohue