My Approach
“First realize that it’s already in you. We do not have to figure out how to radically love ourselves. We have to figure out what conditions have paved over the fertile ground that allows that thing that is naturally in us to sprout, to grow, to continue to grow.”
I see psychotherapy as a collaborative, creative process.
It’s a process that develops uniquely over time within relationship, and each therapy relationship is unique. Together we will discover what is helpful from my training for your lived experience.
Seeing ourselves, our patterns, our pain, and our potential clearly is not a process we can do alone. My approach is rooted in the belief that healing and growth is a “we” process not a “me” process. Meaning, we need relationship with safe and trusted others who see us, help us see ourselves, and hold the work with us. In the isolation of an individualist culture, we often lack the built-in ritual and community that facilitates such a process. Therapy can be a place to practice intentionally being with many different parts of ourselves, and with others, in a supportive and focused environment.
As Smruti Desai says, systemic oppression and the harms of individualism cannot be solved by individual therapy. Still, therapy can be one place where we both investigate our part in, and tend to the ways we are impacted by, oppressive heirarchical systems.
I believe the therapist’s integrity matters deeply to the process, and I’m committed to regularly investigating and uprooting white supremacist and capitalist ideas of healing and well-being from my practice. I grieve the loss of healing traditions and rituals that could have been handed down to me ancestrally through my bloodline and am committed to learning from those whose traditions are more intact.
Some of the models I draw from include: relational psychodynamic principles, trauma informed stabilization treatment, polyvagal theory, internal family systems, attachment theory, politicized somatics/generative somatics, queer theory and systems theory, the wisdom of the body, of nature, and of creative process.
I am a member of the Northwest Alliance for Psychoanalytic Study and the Center for Object Relations, and consistently pursue continuing education in trauma treatment across various modalities.
“ Nothing happens in isolation. There is always a squad, collaborators, a body that supports change occurring.”