Services
- Individual
About My Clients
We all need some basic things to thrive: safety (in relationship and our bodies), authentic contact with ourselves and others, and agency to meet both needs in the world. I work with people healing from complex relational trauma, particularly attachment wounding from personality disordered (BPD/NPD) ways of relating. Many of my clients experience dissociation, depression, anxiety, chronic pain/illness, marginalization and grief, and many carry gifts of sensitivity, intuition and creativity.
My Background and Approach
I have a background in community mental health, working with dual-diagnosis and at-risk populations since 2007. During my time in the field I have studied the foundations for the human potential for thriving and ethical behavior and social structures, and for traumatizing experiences and less than ethical behavior and structures, including the impacts of personality disorders. This focus is deeply heart-centered and necessarily connected to existential, somatic and social justice frames of the origins of wellness and suffering, including the cycle of (internalized and externalized) oppression. I received my MA from CIIS in 2019 and trained with Liberation Institute, a NOTAFLOF clinic in San Francisco geared to support those with highest need. I have since studied Polyvagal Theory and the neurobiology of trauma. My approach is holistic and primarily relational. I believe that healing happens through healing experience and relational trauma heals through safe and attuned relationship.
My Personal Beliefs and Interests
Disorder and oppression are commonplace features of our world, from capitalist zero sum and exploitation and the narcissistic identification with "form" that values possession, action vs being and holds value as hierarchical versus contextual. The cycle of oppression ripples through our shared cultural, societal and genetic inheritance and we have a powerful capacity to orient protectively in the face of such inputs of danger. Complex trauma occurs when we cannot avoid experiencing threat, and become accustomed to states of relative activation, shutdown or both. Fortunately there is safety in the world! As long as this is true, I believe we each have an innate capacity to heal. We each carry neural plasticity that allows us to forge new pathways of experience, which may then be strengthened. Through safety and connection, building tolerance for dysregulation and establishing boundaries to serve and protect our needs, our bodies and minds can heal.