Services & Approach
“Integrity is choosing courage over comfort; choosing what is right over what is fun, fast, or easy; and choosing to practice our values rather than simply professing them.”
– Brene Brown
Therapy for Individuals, Couples or Families:
Therapy usually involves working on issues that are imbedded in the past that have been creating continuous negative patterns in all or most areas of a client’s life. Resolving conflict from the past may be the only way to progress forward. Once clients are able to move through past-related issues, the focus becomes on the present and future. Therapy is usually centered in finding ways to shift thoughts, feelings, and behavior. The treatment goals can involve an increased sense of well-being, relationship building, improving communication levels, and changing behavior patterns. Depending on the client’s needs, I can use therapeutic modalities that access the conscious mind and the unconscious mind.
Life Coaching for Individuals or Couples:
Life Coaching involves more of an equal partnership between coach and client -- a process of inquiry that empowers clients to reconnect with their own inner wisdom, to find their own answers and to rediscover powerful moments of choice where self- transformation occurs. It creates a bridge from where you are to where you want to be in your life. Coaching is intensely goal-oriented. The coach and client work together on identifying core personal development values which when honored are connecting the client to goals in life. A vision is created, which includes both values and goals. An action plan is developed to make the vision become the client’s reality by removing stumbling blocks that in the past may have impeded the client from moving forward and realizing their vision. There is frequent email contact between sessions to further track progress. Life Coaching involves structured homework assignments that are tailored to the client’s goals. Coaching is not advice, therapy, or counseling, but may address specific personal issues, projects, situations and transitions within the client’s life.
Recovery Coaching for Individuals:
Recovery coaching, is like Life Coaching in how it’s modality functions. Recovery Coaching specifically targets clients who have been sober for a minimum of 30 days. With Recovery Coaching, however, the focus is on the client maintaining sobriety while connecting to personal development values, a life purpose, and a life vision.
“The most difficult courage to muster is the courage of imperfection.”
– Albert Adler
Clinical Hypnotherapy:
Hypnotherapy involves putting the client in an altered state to accept positive suggestions supporting the client’s goal(s). This technique taps into the unconscious mind to release emotional blocks and/or limiting beliefs that have, in the past, impeded the client's personal growth. This empowering process allows the client to move through barriers and to reach their goals based on their own definition of success.
Approach
My approach is direct, active, solution-focused, and appropriately challenging. It is my commitment to have an empowering effect in sessions with my clients, with whom I work in collaboration to facilitate powerful transformation. By combining my areas of expertise with the driving thought that the client is the expert of the client, I build upon the client’s strengths and past successes to create long lasting internal positive shifts. Whether clients are seeking therapy, coaching, or hypnotherapy, I explore their value systems as navigational tools to help connect clients with their life purpose(s), goals, and visions. By supporting various internal shifts within the client, one of the major outcomes of the clinical experience is that the client develops a deeper sense of self-agency and becomes the strongest version of a fully expressed self.
I utilize the following techniques to help facilitate the change phase in sessions:
"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony"
– Mahatma Gandhi
Rapid Resolution Therapy (RRT)
Rapid Resolution Therapy is a cutting-edge treatment that uses multi-level communication and specialized tools to resolve emotional disturbance and maladaptive behavior. Unlike traditional cognitive therapy, which only targets the cognitive brain, RRT instead addresses the emotional brain and limbic system. Basically, RRT teaches your deeper mind (unconscious mind) to update so that it “gets” what your logical mind (conscious mind) already knows, thus creating automatic and long-lasting improvements.
RRT combines hypnosis, guided imagery, stories and purposeful communication that elicits a response from the subconscious part of the mind to make these positive shifts. With RRT, a new neural pathway is built through visual imagery, storytelling, and metaphors. RRT treatment is not emotionally painful since clients do not re-experience or expose themselves to their fears as they are addressing the root causes of their issues to clear them.
In addition to helping individuals permanently overcome the ongoing effects that stem from traumatic experiences, RRT treats the following issues: addiction tendencies (chemical and process addictions), anxiety (including panic attacks and phobias), insecurities, anger, depression, guilt, shame, grief, and the feeling of being “stuck”.
Brainspotting
Talk therapy engages the neocortex (our thinking, conscious brain) while somatic therapies (such as Brainspotting) directly access the subcortical system where trauma and distress are often stored, and where talk therapy can’t access. Brainspotting works with the deep brain and the body through its direct access to the autonomic and limbic systems within the body’s central nervous system. Neurobiology research reveals that painful memories can get stuck in the non-verbal, non-cognitive subcortical brain which diminishes our ability to live fully in the here and now. When this happens, some people experience anxiety, depression or just the sense of not feeling like themselves.
How is Brainspotting (BSP) used in therapy sessions: BSP is based on the premise that 'where we look affects how we feel', and finds that eye positions correlate with unconscious, emotional experiences. When you focus on an eye position related to an upsetting issue, you release the emotional and physical stress within the issue, while retraining emotional reactions to the presenting issue.
This helps resolve painful or traumatic experiences allowing optimal functioning to resume.
Brainspotting can be helpful in reducing symptoms of trauma, anxiety (including panic attacks and performance anxiety), depression, creativity and performance blocks, addiction, cravings, compulsive behaviors, unprocessed grief, and medical trauma.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
EMDR or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, developed by Dr. Francine Shapiro in 1989, works on the premise that when a trauma occurs it seems to get locked in the nervous system with the original picture, sounds, thoughts and feelings. This material can combine fact with fantasy and with images that stand for the actual event feelings about it. The eye movements we use in EMDR seem to unlock the nervous system and allow the brain to process the experience. That may be what is happening in REM or dream sleep – the eye movements help to process the unconscious material. Originally used with Vietnamese war veterans suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, positive results have since been reported on a wide number of the population with a variety of psychological problems, including anxiety and depression, as well as for trauma.
It is important for the client to remember that it is your own brain that is doing the healing - you are the one in control.
Trauma Resilience Model (TRM)
Trauma Resilience Model is a somatic alternative to mind-based therapy used to stabilize the nervous system by reducing and/or preventing the symptoms of traumatic stress from the past or present and/or life stressors. TRM recognizes that trauma is experienced first and foremost through the body’s senses, where it is stored through the nervous system. By focusing on training the client to develop a distinct set of resiliency skills, TRM helps build healthier pathways within the body’s muscle memory. This approach allows clients to resist the physical strain that accompanies stress caused by trauma.
Neuro–Linguistic Programming (NLP)
Neuro–Linguistic Programming is a model used to connect to the unconscious mind to eliminate negative emotions and beliefs that in the past have prevented an individual from moving forward with their goals.
Mindfulness Based Techniques
Mindfulness Based Techniques help clients detach from negative thoughts and feelings. This technique allows clients to be an observer of their thoughts and feelings, recognize them for what they are, and realize that they are more than the sum of their thoughts and feelings. This skill implementation permits the client to move into a liberating mental space, which brings about positive change at a rapid rate.
Hypnotherapy
Hypnotherapy is another technique utilized to tap into the unconscious mind, and puts the client in an altered state where they are more likely to accept positive suggestions that support the client’s goal.
Listed below are a few of the many issues that can be helped with hypnosis:
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Calming Anxiety
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Smoking Cessation
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Increasing Self-Confidence
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Increasing Motivation
Solution–Focused Brief Therapy
Solution-Focused Brief Therapy targets what works rather than what’s wrong, specifically focusing on the client’s health versus on the problem. It is based on a non-pathology model that emphasizes the strengths, skills, and resources of the client in a collaborative effort to reach goals and resolve problems rapidly.
Positive Psychology
Positive Psychology fosters happiness in humans by focusing on character strengths and behaviors that allow individuals to build a life of meaning and purpose—to move beyond surviving, to flourishing.
Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT)
Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy is based on the premise that whenever we become upset, it is not the events taking place in our lives that upset us; it is the beliefs that we hold that cause us to become depressed, anxious, enraged, etc. It is used to make behavioral changes at a cognitive level.
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy is based on the idea that our thoughts cause our feelings and behaviors, not external things, like people, situations, and events. The benefit of this fact is that we can change the way we think to feel/act better even if the situation does not change.
Cranial Electronic Stimulation (CES)
Cranial Electronic Stimulation is a form of neurostimulation that delivers a small, pulsed, alternating current via electrodes on the head. CES is used with the intention of treating a variety of conditions such as anxiety, depression and insomnia without depending on medication using electro medial technology.. The specific machine used in the office for CES is an Alpha-Stim Aid machine. Unlike medications which are introduced to your body in a chemical form and then broken down to smaller components such as electrons, Alpha-Stim begins at the electron level, allowing your body’s cells to return to their natural functioning state. Alpha-Stim provides long lasting, cumulative relief without the risk of negative effects such as tolerance and addiction to medications.
Alpha-Stim is often administered by this Therapist in conjunction with hypnotherapy and NLP techniques.
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