My Services
Accelerated Experimental-Dynamic Psychotherapy
Many of the wounds we carry were formed in relationship, and for this reason, healing must also happen in relationship. AEDP is a deeply relational and emotion-focused approach to therapy that understands change as something that unfolds through connection, not in isolation.
From an AEDP perspective, many of the symptoms people struggle with are not signs of something being wrong, but rather the result of having had to endure overwhelming emotions alone. When emotions feel too intense, unsafe, or unsupported, we naturally develop ways to protect ourselves. This may look like avoiding or disconnecting from emotions that feel too much to bear, pulling away from others because connection has not felt reliable, or carrying a belief that we are not worthy of care because past relationships have been hurtful or inconsistent.
These protective strategies make sense. They helped you survive. At the same time, they can also limit emotional processing, connection, and a sense of aliveness in the present.
For many people, especially those who have experienced trauma, access to emotions may be blocked by protective responses that once helped make overwhelming experiences more tolerable. Rather than pushing past these protections, AEDP approaches them with curiosity and compassion, recognizing them as meaningful responses to what you have lived through.
By building a sense of safety together, the need for these protections can begin to soften. With support and connection, it becomes more possible to stay present with emotions and experiences that were once too much to endure alone. Through being together with emotion in this way, emotions can be experienced differently, allowing your natural capacity to heal to emerge and making space for greater self-understanding, resilience, and connection with yourself and others.
Emotion Focused Therapy
Emotions carry important information about our needs, our boundaries, and how we relate to ourselves and others. When we were supported in learning how to understand and work with emotions, they can guide us toward clarity, connection, and meaningful action. When this support was missing or inconsistent, emotions can feel confusing, overwhelming, muted, or difficult to trust.
In our work together, we focus on learning how to relate to emotions with greater awareness and care. This includes practicing how to notice emotions as they arise, identify and name them, and understand the needs they are pointing to. We also explore how to fully feel emotions that need processing, while staying curious about emotions that may be blocking access to something more vulnerable underneath.
Over time, we pay attention to patterns in how emotions show up in relationships, how you respond to them, and how emotional experiences are held in the body. This helps build a clearer, more compassionate understanding of your emotional world and how it has been shaped by your experiences.
For many people, these skills were never modelled or supported early in life, making it hard to know how to work with emotions on one’s own. Within a supportive and attuned therapeutic relationship, we can practice these skills together, allowing new emotional experiences to emerge and helping emotions become sources of guidance, strength, and connection rather than confusion or distress.
Internal Family Systems
Just like in our external families, we all have internal systems made up of different parts. These parts can hold different beliefs, roles, expectations, emotions, and experiences, and each developed for a reason.
At times, certain parts may be pushed away or exiled because they carry pain that feels too overwhelming to hold alone. Other parts may take on protective roles that once helped us survive but can begin to cause more harm than good in the present.
When I use Internal Family Systems in my work, we focus on working with, rather than against, each part. Together, we become curious about the roles protective parts have taken on, how they have served you, and where they came from. We also take time to understand the burdens they carry and the conditions that made their roles necessary.
As safety and understanding grow, these protective parts may begin to soften, creating space for denied, exiled, or forgotten parts to emerge. This allows for greater wholeness and more authentic self-expression.
What I value most about parts work is how empowering it can be. As clients learn to listen to and relate to their internal systems with curiosity and compassion, they begin to guide themselves toward healing rather than self-destruction. Witnessing this kind of internal shift continues to remind me of the deeply human capacity for self-understanding, growth, and transformation.
Inner Child Work
As children, we depend on our caregivers and environments to meet essential developmental needs, such as safety, love, belonging, acceptance, physical care, and the freedom to express ourselves and have our voices heard. When these needs are unmet, inconsistent, or unsafe, parts of us can become developmentally frozen or stuck at the age when the deprivation occurred.
Inner child work focuses on returning to these younger parts with care, curiosity, and support, so that the needs that were missed or interrupted can finally be met. Rather than reliving the past, this work is about creating new emotional experiences in the present that offer safety, nurture, agency, and validation.
This may involve using imagination to connect with younger parts of yourself, engaging in conversations that allow your inner child to express feelings, needs, and long-held pain. It can also involve revisiting memories from a more empowered and compassionate stance, allowing experiences to be felt and remembered differently, which can shift how they are held in both the body and the heart.
Because children primarily process experience through the right side of the brain, inner child work often includes creative and expressive approaches such as art, music, imagery, or working with photographs. These mediums can help access emotional experiences that are difficult to reach through words alone.
Through this process, inner child work supports healing, self-compassion, and a fuller, more authentic expression of who you are in the present.
Somatic Practices
Emotions are experienced in the body. When emotions cannot be fully felt or expressed, they are often held physically. Our bodies develop instinctive responses to help us survive. When we sense danger, fear may urge us to fight, flee, seek safety, or collapse to conserve energy. When we experience injustice, anger can arise to help us protect ourselves or others. When we experience loss, grief and sorrow often need release through tears.
But what happens when we were not given the safety, freedom, or permission to express these responses? What happens when grief was faced alone and became too overwhelming to bear? What happens when safety could not be found and the body remained in a state of alarm or shutdown?
In our work together, we begin the practice of listening to the body so these unmet needs and held experiences can be gently acknowledged and completed. This may involve noticing where emotions live in the body, becoming curious about what your body is communicating, or allowing impulses such as crying, shaking, or expressing anger to unfold in ways that feel safe and supported. It may also involve slowly reconnecting with your body as a place that can feel safe again.
Wherever you are in your capacity, I aim to meet you there and support a growing sense of connection with both your emotions and your body.
Strength-Based and Trauma-Informed
For me, a strength-based and trauma-informed approach go hand in hand.
When we experience trauma or prolonged emotional pain, our brains and bodies adapt in powerful and intelligent ways to help us survive. These adaptations often take the form of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn responses. Fight may show up as anger or pushing back to protect ourselves. Flight can involve avoidance, busyness, or leaving situations that feel unsafe. Freeze or collapse may occur when escape is not possible, allowing the body to conserve energy and endure what cannot be changed. Fawn can involve prioritizing others’ needs, appeasing, or staying agreeable in order to maintain safety and connection.
When we are threatened, whether physically or emotionally, these responses are vital to our survival and well-being. They are not signs of weakness, but evidence of a nervous system doing exactly what it needed to do to keep us safe. In this way, our responses to danger, pain, and overwhelm reflect resilience, adaptability, and strength.
The difficulty is that long after the original threat has passed, these same protective patterns can remain active. What once helped us survive may begin to limit emotional expression, connection, or growth in the present.
In our work together, we take time to explore how your own internal systems learned to adapt in response to adversity, and how these adaptations helped you survive and function. We approach this with curiosity, compassion, and respect, acknowledging the strength and resilience these responses represent, while also gently noticing where they may no longer be serving you. From this place, new possibilities for safety, choice, and growth can begin to emerge.
Mindfulness
I integrate mindfulness into my work in two interconnected ways.
On one level, mindfulness involves practicing skills in session that support greater presence with both your inner and outer world. These practices can help build tolerance for sitting with difficult emotions, calm and settle overwhelming feelings, and expand your capacity to respond to yourself with compassion when self-criticism arises. This may include using the breath to support steadiness, engaging the senses to feel more grounded, using imagination to cultivate compassion, or gently activating the body and mind to create aliveness when you feel numb, or settling when you feel overwhelmed.
At the same time, mindfulness is not only something we practice, but something that shapes how we work together as a whole. Throughout our sessions, I may invite moments of slowing down, pausing, and listening inward to emotions, sensations, and shifts as they arise. This moment-to-moment attention to your lived experience is mindfulness in action and is central to the therapeutic process.
Together, we work toward developing a more present, compassionate relationship with yourself, one that feels accessible, supportive, and aligned with who you are.
Brainspotting
Brainspotting is a brain-based approach that helps access and process experiences held in deeper, emotional regions of the brain that are not always reached through talking alone. While traditional talk therapy often engages the thinking, reflective parts of the brain, Brainspotting supports access to more subcortical areas where trauma and emotional memory can be held.
In our work together, we may use gentle visual focus, sound, and attention to bodily sensations to help access these deeper layers of experience. These supports can make it easier to stay connected to emotions and sensations that feel stuck or difficult to reach, allowing the brain and body to process them at a pace that feels safe and contained.
Brainspotting can support emotional processing while also deepening awareness of how emotions are experienced in the body.
