“Dialectics” is the experience of holding two seemingly opposing ideas, feelings, experiences simultaneously to reduce rigidity and distress. DBT is skills-based wherein I teach you mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotional regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness skills in order to better cope with your lived experiences and improve your relationships with others.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy presumes that if we change the way we think, we change the way we feel, and we change the way we behave. Sometimes it’s the problem that causes us the most distress, it’s the way we think about it. If we change the way we think about it, we change our relationship.

Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy combines this approach with mindfulness practices to prevent overintellectualizing and essentially intellectually bypassing our feelings. In turn, this helps in mediating thoughts and feelings where one doesn’t override the other.

I use an integrative approach of narrative, mindfulness, and internal family systems interventions to help you map and integrate cohesion among various parts of yourself. All parts of you are welcome.

An example of this is what folks tend to describe, “a part of me feels…and another part feels…” We work with these parts!

Additionally, I encourage clients to re-establish safety within themselves through somatic work. When it comes to my approach to trauma, we let the body lead. We can’t think our way out of trauma.

Expressive Arts: When appropriate, and if clients express interest, I offer integrated somatic and expressive arts interventions to facilitate processing. Sometimes we do not have the “right words” to convey our experiences and creative, experiential approaches are helpful in bridging this gap.

Narrative: We tell ourselves stories about ourselves and the world all the time, and sometimes we don’t realize the stories we tell ourselves don’t truly reflect our experiences. I support clients to externalize, deconstruct, and re-author these stories through clarifying language used and contextualizing the experiences. In this way, honoring a person’s story in context of their personal history, family, family history, current sociopolitical climate, spirituality, and unique intersectionality of identities is important.

Motivational Interviewing: This is a collaborative process of weighing the risks & rewards and pros & cons. Through this process, people are able to explore motivators, ambivalence, and barriers for behavior changes in order to make informed decisions.