Anxiety

It comes in different shapes and sizes and shows up in different ways — everyone wears it differently. One thing is consistent: anxiety holds us back in ways we wish it didn’t; it diminishes our sense of peace. In small doses, and congruent with immediately needed action, anxiety can be useful for motivation. When anxiety is extreme, and/or constant, however, it can be debilitating.

The body’s alarm system creates errors sometimes, causing us to feel a sense of threat where threat isn’t in fact present. In our work together, I help you learn to test the reality of the thoughts driving your anxiety, or in other words, I teach you to check anxiety-provoking perceptions against reality. When we can determine what is real, we can take back the emotional reins. I’ll help you develop ways to create a sense of safety within your nervous system, so you can begin to be freed from anxiety’s restraint.

Relationship Challenges and Dysfunction

Our romantic relationships are some of our most important and protected relationships. They can invoke the highest sense of joy and connection, and are also the contexts in which our hearts are supremely vulnerable and primed to be triggered. When we zoom out of the intricate details of interactions, fights, hurt feelings, we can almost always find a cyclical pattern occurring. Within these patterns each partner’s ways of seeking to have their emotional needs met is coming into conflict with the other’s. In our work together, I help identify these cycles, and teach the couple how to disrupt the current pattern, creating the peace, connection, and security both partners desire.

Self Esteem

Disruption to our self esteem beats within the pulse of depression, anxiety, ADHD, and many other psychological challenges and disorders. Through our work together, we’ll find what’s driving your specific blocks to confidence, and where they came from. From there, I’ll guide you in developing a stability in knowing about yourself. This is confidence – it’s not about what we do, it’s about what we know about ourselves. From that place of knowing, you’ll develop trust in yourself that will ground you through social, professional, romantic, academic and other settings that have been the battleground for your self esteem.

Traumatic Brain Injury

It’s as if you’re in a bad dream – the kind where you’re trying to run, but for some unknown reason your legs don’t work. You wish with everything in you that you could wake up from this bad dream – for everything to go back to normal.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a physical injury to the brain that can cause damage to various brain functions, which may include memory, attention, processing, word finding, and emotional regulation. In addition to functional changes, the trauma itself and the devastating impact of these changes can cause profound psychological affliction. Where injury to the brain is present, so is injury to the psyche. I’ll help you safely process the trauma you’ve endured, and help you grapple with feeling like a stranger in your own brain.

To suddenly function, communicate, and feel so different than you ever have before is like being dropped into a new country, trying to read a map written in a language you’ve never seen before. It’s scary, it’s lonely, it’s deflating. I’ll work with you to navigate the new roads, manage these painful feelings and expand your tolerance of them, and develop resilience in the face of this adversity.

I’ll guide you in finding acceptance in this new reality, such that we can help you learn to move forward and continue living and growing. Neuroplasticity – your brain’s ability to evolve, adapt, and create new connections – is possible until the moment we take our last breath. By this principle, even an injured brain can continue to heal, to grow, to thrive. And I’m here to teach you how.