Building Trust & Rapport

Immediately coming into the therapeutic room, I strive to cultivate a deeply relational connection with folks, built off openness, collaboration, and mutual respect — free of judgment and shame. I believe healing happens in the context of relationships, and I create a space where you feel seen, heard, and valued. Rather than imposing a rigid structure, I support you in discovering your own autonomy—helping you define what healing, growth, and well-being look like for you and what you hope to gain from our therapeutic working relationship. Also, it is common for me to utilize humor <objective>, as laughter is a wonderful tool to build connection and help dissolve tensions.

I tend to follow the clients lead in session, to allow folks agency, autonomy and self-determination in our time. What this means, or how that plays out in session, I will often ask fairly early-on in session, ‘so, what would you like to focus on today?’ or, ‘what would you like our time to look like today?’ Knowing others like to have, or sometimes need, a little more direction, or guidance, it is also within my professional purview to have a wide-range of questions that may evoke responses that may give our time more focus or direction.

I am continuously engaging in clinical supervision, group consultation and peer support to ensure I am strengthening my skill set as a clinician. Most namely, it is my role to ensure I am allowing clients space to express and explore their own values and beliefs. It is not my role to push my beliefs or assert my values, and that is my professional assurance to you — that I will work diligently to ensure the therapeutic space is fully and uniquely yours. I welcome feedback and openness from clients if I may inadvertently speak from a place of my bias or value.

Evidenced-Based Modalities

Building off initial trust & rapport, I utilize a handful of evidenced-based modalities, or therapeutic interventions. As stated prior, my approach is not generally that of a rigid structure, but rather a natural flow of utilizing direct techniques when the timing of such is pertinent.

For example, when targeting areas of anxiety, stress, anger, frustration, it may be beneficial to draw from the knowledge and application of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy [ACT]. In this modality, I express with clients an effort to ‘gain control over our emotional state’ as opposed to ‘our emotional state having control over us.’ The Acceptance and Commitment Therapy modality is a proven, effective modality in achieving just that.

Scaffolding deeper within the ACT modality, it is common to recognize patterns, or cycles, of presenting behaviors, thoughts, feelings and/or emotions. As these patterns emerge within the longevity of our working relationship, an extremely effective modality to better understand our behavioral patterns <triggers, antecedents, precipitating factors, etc.> is Internal Family Systems [IFS], or ‘parts work.’ I am being trained as a Level 1 IFS practitioner, and am experiencing positive, effective results in this modality with clients as they gain a deeper understanding of the neuro-biological mechanics that make up our internal/external behavioral response system <our central nervous system and autonomic nervous system working together>.

Rooted in Self-Compassion

Rather than using judgment or shame to change behaviors, I try and help foster a place of deep self-compassion and kindness toward self. Though we may feel judgment and shame at times, they rarely help bring about long, sustainable change in our thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

In mental health, we operationalize a working difference between ‘shame’ and ‘guilt.’ Shame has a notion of “I am bad”, whereas guilt has a degree of “I did bad.” We are hoping to separate our humanness from our actions or behaviors.

As mentioning the Internal Family Systems, or parts work, modality, this leans heavily into the practice of self-compassion. My professional philosophy agrees with IFS literature that our behaviors tend to be learned, or adaptive, to the environment around us. Humans are a wise and resilient creature — adapting to our environment as a means of survival and safety.

However, our environments change over time. Our human body changes over time <we create new blood, new cells, new tissues, new neural pathways>… so our behaviors need to change as well! What was once necessary, adaptive for our safety and/or protection, may eventually become maladaptive, or may hinder our growth, or safety and security.

Self-compassion comes in, through acknowledging, and validating our past-selves show of these adaptive behaviors, while simultaneously acknowledging perhaps it is time to evolve, or shift, those behaviors into something new. Through kindness and compassion, our protective behaviors are more open to evolvement, or change, as opposed to shaming ourselves into changing.