I specialize in working with teens, adults, families and couples.
The following are my areas of expertise:

I provide a holistic psychotherapy approach for those who are looking to grow, heal and recover from life struggles while journeying towards an improved quality of life. During the treatment process, I focus on the relationship between your mind, body and spirit, in an attempt to understand and address ways one aspect may lead to concerns in another. I will listen to your story and work with you toward achieving and maintaining balance in all life areas.

The following are the various modalities I use during psychotherapy sessions:

• Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT)
• Trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (TF-CBT)
• Dialectical-behavioral therapy (DBT)
• Emotional Focused Therapy (EFT)
• Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
• Structural family therapy
• Solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT)
• Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT)
• Motivational interviewing
• Psychodynamic psychotherapy
• Attachment based therapy

After years of working with client’s who struggle with mental health and/or addiction, I realized often, clients have experienced a “simple trauma or a complex trauma” during their lifetime. This drove me to want to gain a better understanding of trauma and how it impacts client’s risk of mental health and addiction. EMDR fell in my lap as I never heard of this modality before 2019. In March 2019, I completed level one and two trainings in EMDR with instructors who trained under Francine Shapiro, founder of EMDR. Following this intensive training I completed the required consultation hours with an EMDRIA certified professional in order to obtain my certification. I utilize the full EMDR protocol when working with patients.

EMDR is a type of psychotherapy enables people to heal from the symptoms and emotional distress that are the result of disturbing life experiences. Repeated studies show that by using EMDR therapy people can experience the benefits of psychotherapy that once took years to make a difference. It is widely assumed that severe emotional pain requires a long time to heal. EMDR therapy shows that the mind can in fact heal from psychological trauma much as the body recovers from physical trauma. When you cut your hand, your body works to close the wound. If a foreign object or repeated injury irritates the wound, it festers and causes pain. Once the block is removed, healing resumes. EMDR therapy demonstrates that a similar sequence of events occurs with mental processes. The brain’s information processing system naturally moves toward mental health. Using the detailed protocols and procedures learned in EMDR therapy training sessions, I guide clients to activate their natural healing processes.

EMDR therapy is an eight-phase treatment process. Eye movements (or bilateral stimulation) are used during one part of the session. After determining which memory to target first, I ask the client to hold different aspects of that event or thought in mind and to use his/her eyes to track my hand as it moves back and forth across the client’s field of vision. As this happens, for reasons believed by researchers to be connected with the biological mechanisms involved in Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, internal associations arise and the clients begin to process the memory and disturbing feelings. In successful EMDR therapy, the meaning of painful events is transformed on an emotional level. Unlike talk therapy, the insights clients gain in EMDR therapy result not so much from clinician interpretation, but from the client’s own accelerated intellectual and emotional processes. The net effect is that clients conclude EMDR therapy feeling empowered by the very experiences that once debased them. Their wounds have not just closed, they have transformed. As a natural outcome of the EMDR therapeutic process, the clients’ thoughts, feelings and behavior are all robust indicators of emotional health and resolution—all without speaking in detail or doing homework used in other therapies.