It is a privilege to support people in this process. I wholeheartedly agree with Stephen Porges that ‘safety is the treatment’. I’ll add that kindness is the medicine.
How therapy works
The foundation of therapy is a safe and trusting therapeutic alliance. The client's best interests are always front and centre. Through a collaborative relationship that is truly safe, people are able to trust themselves more and find the answers they want. I'm here to offer guidance if the questions feel too big to manage on your own. Or current challenges may relate to long-standing issues that may come to the surface in a new relationship within the broader context of personal or cultural histories. Prolonged or severe stress in response to transition may include fear and other debilitating symptoms that limit healthy ways of relating to others and receiving healthy support. A good therapist models healthy compassionate attention to all the parts we like and dislike. Its no secret that self compassion is good medicine for emotional well-being.
Cultivating kind attention helps challenge negative thoughts, doubt and confusion that effects our ability to make sense of what’s happening. Therapy helps to bring meaning to these processes to increase trust, confidence, and insight to change habitual patterns or beliefs. Current neuroscience also provides evidence that when people are able to rest in the safety of therapeutic support, innate capacities for healing and growth are activated.
In the context of grief, loss and trauma, we know that isolation increases suffering. Because trauma happens in isolation and disrupts essential connections, many people express feeling alone and "lost" in the world. Within a nurturing therapeutic environment, therapy is a way to reestablish healthy and safe connections with the whole range of human emotions to uncouple fear and isolation. Together, therapy helps to reduce symptoms that increase suffering with new tools to shift unhealthy behaviours and patterns into more nourishing ones.
The language of the body
Grounded in neuroscience and physiology of stress and trauma, I help clients learn how to listen and support the language of the body. Recent findings in neuroscience research are confirming the basic premise of body psychotherapy that the sense of self is rooted in the body and catalyzed by relationships and the environment. Mindful awareness of body experience alters brain function, mental activity, interpersonal relationships and overall well-being. With compassionate support, I offer ways to learn how to pay attention to body and mind. By including the wisdom of the body, mind, emotions, and interpersonal relationship, we gain awareness into our full potential with new resources that become practical tools for daily use.
Predominant psychotherapeutic techniques, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, have not paid sufficient attention to physical sensations and automatic responses to stress which are highly relevant to therapy. To quote Steven Porges, "our physiology colours our perception of the world." Neuroscience research addresses the need to include information about the autonomic nervous system, 'the physiological bottom of the mind.' The result is a therapeutic approach with a more balanced emphasis on emotion and reason. By increasing awareness with body and mind in the here-and now, new healthy patterns are experienced, identified, and developed to heal from the past while supporting insight and skills in the present.
Working with trauma
Trauma is defined as anything that overwhelms the integrated system of body-mind and interferes with natural healthy self-protective responses. Understanding how stress, including anxiety, depression, and traumatic stress, impacts optimal functioning is key to working with traumatic experiences or events.
Including the body means we learn to pay equal attention to verbal and non-verbal cues of safety and perceived or real threat. Establishing safety within the therapeutic alliance is therefore essential to working with trauma of any nature. If we habitually act on automatic impulses designed to keep us safe, even once danger has passed, the body gets stuck on high alert and inherent healing capacities are inhibited in the absence of safety and sufficient rest. If these automatic responses to stress are prolonged or severe, the ability to make a conscious choice is increasingly diminished as automatic responses habitually kick in. This is a common symptom of post-traumatic stress, or PTSD, a lack of control over the body's survival-based instincts to overcome traumatic experiences. Outside of awareness, the body may habitually respond as if the past experience is recurring in the present. That’s how patterns emerge. Without conscious attention, these patterns continue and may be absorbed into an aspect of one’s character, or personality. This is often a great relief, to understand that our basic biological responses are not as ‘personal’ as we may have been conditioned to believe. The practice is to develop kind attention with mindfulness to body sensations, even as new thoughts occur. Working with awareness in the present, traumatic experiences are processed and integrated into the self with new resources and self-compassion for what supported survival then.
By listening to these basic instincts and learning from them, the body is supported to process and complete healthy self-protective adaptive responses that were interrupted in the face of a traumatic experience. Developing mindfulness of body sensations supports self-regulation and the integration of previously intolerable sensations, emotions, thoughts or beliefs associated with traumatic content. Including the whole person in the context of family and systemic cultural oppression, we gain insight into personal and ancestral patterns with new resources that support change, healing and movement toward what we want most in life.
Areas of Expertise
Trauma and PTSD
Stress, anxiety and panic
Self-esteem
Depression
Family of origin issues
Life transitions
Violence - witness or victim
Sexual assault
Childhood abuse (emotional, physical or sexual)
Extreme dissociation
Grief and loss
Training
My professional training includes and integrates the following modalities:
Somatic Experiencing
Bodynamic Somatic Developmental Psychotherapy
Body-Mind Psychotherapy
Experiential Accelerated Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP)
Family Systems
Emotionally-Focussed Couples Therapy
Aboriginal Focusing-Oriented Therapy
Mindfulness
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy