my approach
RELATIONAL APPROACH
A relational approach to therapy acknowledges the specific healing benefits to the unique relationship you have with your therapist. When there is authentic connection within the therapy, patterns and styles of relating that both interfere and enhance our lives emerge. Exploring these patterns within the safety of the therapeutic relationship can offer impactful and positive changes to important relationships in our lives.
A Place To Sit
Don’t go outside your house to see flowers.
My friend, don’t bother with that excursion.
Inside your body there are flowers.
One flower has a thousand petals.
That will do for a place to sit.
Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty
inside the body and out of it, before gardens and after gardens.
-Kabir translated by Robert Bly
ART THERAPY
Art Therapy is a specialized form of psychotherapy that uses art materials to assist in meaningful personal expression and understanding with a clinically trained therapist. We are all born with a human instinct for symbolic and artistic expression (think of 14,000 year old cave paintings!). When used in a therapeutic setting, this capacity for creativity can be an effective and holistic tool for improving mental health and wellness. It connects our bodies and minds while allowing us the freedom to say more than one idea or feeling at a time. This reflects a more accurate and authentic communication of our unique inner experience. It also helps make connections within yourself and with another person (your therapist) that can heal your brain and your relationships. Art therapy is for all ages, requires no artistic skill, and can be part of an individual, couples, family or a group therapy process.
You must give birth to your images.
They are the future waiting to be born.
Fear not the strangeness you feel.
The future must enter you long before it happens.
Just wait for the birth, for the hour of the new clarity.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
DIVERSITY AFFIRMATIVE
Diversity affirmative therapy practice means everyone should have access to therapy without fear of being judged or stigmatized. It is a therapist holding in mind systemic factors that impact individual experience. It is an effort to reduce barriers to health and wellness with a therapeutic practice that recognizes privilege and intersectionality with regard to a person’s sexuality, race, ethnicity, culture, religion, and gender.
OCEANS
I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
And nothing
happens! Nothing...Silence...Waves...
--Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?