Adrienne Skarin (she/her)

I help people who want to have healthier relationships. I work to build emotion regulation skills to feel safe in order to use interpersonal relationship skills to have a result of better relationships. I can teach skills to be more assertive and have healthy boundaries. What I have learned in my work is we humans need to first learn skills to feel safe to incorporate these important life skills, and that's what I love to help people do.

I take the time to build a safe space with people to process their traumas. We go as slow as needed. I help people build skills to "turn off" unhelpful fight, flight, freeze or fawn (people pleasing) stress responses. We are born equipped with these, and some of these we learned are useful through stressful or traumatic life experiences. Being out of those experiences, you might be realizing its no longer helpful. We can use EMDR to target specific traumas.

I empower people to be the expert on their anxiety while using my expertise to learn roots of anxiety, and what you can do about it now. We can use my knowledge and experience in the field to choose tools and techniques to manage, then decrease anxiety. I help build emotion regulation, grounding skills, mindfulness, CBT, and we can choose to use EMDR if you wish to try it.

We can use CBT to explore specific thought patterns and core beliefs about yourself and the world. We can process where these thoughts come from, then you decide what works and no longer works for you to believe and use CBT tools to challenge and reframe them to be more in line with your current values and beliefs. Many of us have beliefs and values modeled to us that we no longer want to hold onto. CBT may be able to help that.

We all attached to our early caregivers in different ways for a wide variety of reasons. Experiences such as whether or not your caregiver hugged you, attended to your daily/basic needs, attended to your emotional needs, made you feel safe or afraid, all impact the way we attach in other relationships. We can use attachment theory to understand your attachment style and incorporate therapeutic techniques to address any attachment wounds you may discover about yourself.

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing. This is different from traditional "talk therapy". It is a specific trauma therapy approach that can help process life stressors and traumas in a healthy way, rather than have them be stuck in the brain and constantly feeling activated by them, as if they are happening again. For more info on the details and science behind it, see the article link: https://psychcentral.com/health/emdr-therapy.