You're Not Broken — You Just Learned to Survive This Way
Who I work with
I specialize in working with women and LGBTQIA+ with trauma, anxiety, SUD.
Many of the adults I work with carry a quiet sense of being different — as if everyone else got a manual they never received. People-pleasing. Perfectionism. Hyper-independence. Caretaking. Substance use. These patterns made sense once (maybe you were the peacekeeper growing up, or substances gave feelings somewhere to go) — and now they may be getting in the way of your relationships, your self-trust, and your ability to feel at ease.
My work is to hold space where you can arrive as you are. No performing. No fixing required.
Together, we'll gently explore where these patterns come from and how they show up (in your relationships, your self-worth, your ability to feel at home in your own body), and begin to untangle what you learned so there's room for something new. I have experience working with people who grew up with emotional unpredictability or a lack of nurture and support from caregivers, who were raised by a parent navigating addiction or mental health struggles, or who experienced physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, neglect, or religious trauma. I also work with people shaped by racism and discrimination, bullying, economic insecurity, abandonment and loss, divorce, or parentification.
How trauma shows up:
Diagnoses and symptoms like C-PTSD, anxiety, depression, stress and panic disorders, adjustment disorders, borderline personality disorder, substance use, and ADHD
A persistent sense of unease, hyper-vigilance, or feeling "on guard"
Difficulty trusting your own judgment or instincts
People-pleasing and difficulty setting boundaries
Perfectionism, or feeling you must earn love and acceptance
Hyper-independence, or discomfort asking for help
Emotional reactivity, or conversely, feeling numb or shut down
Disconnection from your body and difficulty identifying what you feel
Intellectualizing your feelings rather than experiencing them
A diminished sense of self, or feeling like you have to shrink to be accepted
Struggles with intimacy, trust, or connection in relationships
Chronic shame or guilt, even when you've done nothing wrong
Using substances, food, work, or other behaviors to cope or numb out
A sense of being stuck, like nothing will really change
A chronic sense of not feeling "normal" or like you belong
Services
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
EMDR is a structured, evidence-based approach that helps the brain process memories that have gotten "stuck" — often from trauma, distressing experiences, or moments that still feel emotionally raw even years later.
Uses bilateral stimulation (like guided eye movements, tapping, or sound) alongside dual attention to help move stuck memories toward processing and resolution.
Targets the way trauma gets stored in the nervous system — not just the story of what happened, but the emotional and physical charge still attached to it.
Helps lower future activation, so triggers that once felt overwhelming begin to feel more manageable, or lose their charge altogether.
Doesn't require you to talk through every detail of what happened — much of the healing happens through the brain's own reprocessing, guided gently by me
Modalities I Use:
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
IFS is a compassionate framework that views the mind as made up of different "parts" — like the part that protects you by staying busy, the part that carries old pain, or the part that's quick to criticize. None of these parts are the enemy; each one developed to help you survive something.
Helps you connect with and understand these parts, rather than fighting or suppressing them.
Builds a relationship between you and your parts from a place of curiosity and compassion, instead of shame or control.
Guides you back to your core Self — the calm, confident, compassionate center that IFS believes everyone has access to, even beneath the noisiest or most protective parts.
Can help ease internal conflict, self-criticism, and patterns that feel automatic or hard to shift through insight alone.
Polyvagal Theory & Somatic Experiencing(body-based, bottom-up approaches)
These approaches work with the body first, recognizing that trauma and stress live in the nervous system — not just in thoughts or memories. Rather than talking through what happened, we build awareness of what's happening right now, in your body, moment to moment.
Builds nervous system awareness — learning to recognize your own cues of safety and danger, often before you're consciously aware of them.
Helps you notice patterns like fight, flight, freeze, or fawn as they show up in real time, rather than only understanding them intellectually after the fact.
Gently reshapes habitual danger responses, helping your nervous system learn — through repeated, felt experience — that safety is possible again.
Uses body-based cues (breath, posture, sensation) as a doorway into healing, especially helpful when talking alone hasn't been enough.
Existential Therapy
Existential therapy explores the bigger questions underneath the day-to-day struggles — questions about meaning, freedom, identity, connection, and mortality. Rather than focusing only on symptoms, it asks: what kind of life do you actually want to be living, and what's getting in the way?
Empowers you to take personal responsibility for your choices, rather than feeling like life is simply happening to you.
Helps you reconnect with your sense of free will — the ability to choose your response, your values, and your direction, even amid difficult circumstances.
Supports you in facing hard truths (uncertainty, loss, isolation, mortality) with courage instead of avoidance, so they stop running quietly in the background.
Guides you toward a more authentic, purposeful life — one aligned with your own values, not the expectations you've absorbed from others.
Psychodynamic Therapy
Psychodynamic therapy looks beneath the surface — at the unconscious patterns, early relationships, and past experiences that continue to shape how you think, feel, and relate to others today, often without you realizing it.
Explores how early relationships and experiences shape current patterns in your thoughts, emotions, and relationships.
Brings unconscious patterns into conscious awareness, so old, automatic reactions become something you can actually see and choose differently.
Uses the therapeutic relationship itself as a mirror — noticing what shows up between us can reveal patterns that show up in your other relationships too.
Helps you understand not just what you do, but why — connecting present struggles to their roots, so change goes deeper than just managing symptoms.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
DBT blends acceptance and change — helping you build real skills for managing intense emotions while learning to accept where you are right now, without judgment. In our work together, I focus especially on radical acceptance and mindfulness.
Radical acceptance helps you stop fighting reality as it is, even when it's painful — not resigning yourself to it, but releasing the extra suffering that comes from resisting what's already true.
Mindfulness builds your capacity to stay present with difficult emotions and sensations, rather than getting swept away by them or numbing out.
Together, these skills create space between what you feel and how you react — so intense emotions become something you can move through, instead of something that controls you.