Therapy Approaches
I don’t believe one kind of therapy works for every person—or even that one kind of therapy is always enough for the same person.
Sometimes we need to change what we’re doing. Sometimes we need to understand where a pattern came from. Sometimes we need to learn how to make room for thoughts and feelings instead of fighting them. And sometimes our bodies are carrying something that talking about it hasn’t been able to reach.
I draw from several evidence-based and experiential approaches and use them intentionally based on what we’re working on together.
ERP is the primary approach I use for OCD. It helps you practice facing uncertainty and discomfort without relying on compulsions to feel safe.
The goal isn’t to get rid of intrusive thoughts or prove that your fears won’t happen. It’s to change your relationship with uncertainty so OCD has less power over how you live your life.
Sometimes the harder we work to get rid of a thought or feeling, the more power it seems to have.
ACT helps us develop a different relationship with what’s happening inside of us. Instead of waiting until anxiety disappears, certainty arrives, or everything feels right, we learn how to make room for uncomfortable experiences while continuing to move toward the people, relationships, and things that matter to us.
In other words: your mind gets to have an opinion. It doesn’t always get to run your life.
Not everything we know intellectually has caught up emotionally—or physically.
You may understand exactly why something happened, know that you’re safe now, and still notice your body responding as though the past is happening in the present.
I use EMDR and somatic approaches to work with experiences that may show up not only in the story we tell about what happened, but also in our emotions, sensations, reactions, and nervous system.
The goal isn’t to erase the past. It’s to help the past feel more like something that happened rather than something you’re still living inside of.
Many of the things we struggle with don’t happen in isolation. They happen in relationships.
Our experiences of connection can shape what we expect from other people, what happens when we feel rejected or disconnected, how comfortable we are depending on someone, and what we do when closeness begins to feel uncertain.
Attachment and emotion-focused work helps us slow those patterns down, understand the emotions and needs underneath them, and develop new ways of relating—to ourselves and to the people we love.
Most of us contain contradictions.
A part of you may desperately want closeness while another wants to run. One part may understand that you’re safe while another remains terrified. You can want to change and resist changing at exactly the same time.
Parts work gives us a way to approach those contradictions with curiosity instead of deciding that one part of you is the problem.
Rather than asking, “How do I get rid of this part of myself?” we can begin asking, “What is this part trying to do for me?”
Often, even our most frustrating patterns began as attempts to protect us.
CBT can help us notice the connections between our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors and identify patterns that may be keeping us stuck.
Family systems work widens the lens. Instead of looking at you as though you developed in a vacuum, we consider the families, relationships, roles, rules, beliefs, and larger systems that helped shape you.
Because sometimes the most useful question isn’t “What’s wrong with me?”
It’s “What happened around me that made this response make sense?”
These approaches aren’t separate boxes that I expect you to fit into. Therapy may move between them depending on what you need.
We might use ERP to change the way you respond to an obsession, ACT to help you make room for uncertainty, parts work to understand why another part of you is fighting so hard for control, or attachment work to explore why a particular fear becomes so powerful in your relationships.
The approach serves the work—not the other way around.