My Approach
When you’re ready to process trauma, you need a therapist who is engaged, involved and invested in you. My intention is to do focused work that helps my clients arrive somewhere.
If you’re reading this page, you’re probably wondering about the nuts and bolts of what we’ll be doing in session – and about what differentiates me from all the other trauma therapists out there.
I have advanced postgraduate training in multiple therapeutic modalities for treating trauma and PTSD (see below.) Over the years, I’ve incorporated many useful elements from these modalities and others into my clinical work, and don’t adhere strictly to one single method. However, I do follow some core principles that guide my trauma processing work:
Structure
A little meandering is inevitable – and even necessary and beneficial – in the course of therapy, but I believe it’s important that we have some sense of direction and containment as we process trauma.
Sometime in your first few sessions, we will collaborate on a plan for our process that is both clear and flexible.
Exposure
In the context of trauma therapy, “exposure” means that we will be working directly with your traumatic memories. This is the part of therapy I find clients are usually the most anxious about and the part that brings the most benefit.
If you’re worried about how this will work because your memories are fragmented, or because you have experienced chronic trauma and don’t know how we could possibly get to processing all those memories – this is true for many of my clients, and the exposure process is still adaptable and beneficial for these situations.
Integrating explicit & implicit memory
“Just talking” isn’t enough, and forms of therapy that don’t access implicit memory are why people who feel emotionally disconnected when talking about their traumatic memories often haven’t experienced much benefit from doing so with therapists.
The forms of therapy I use are designed to access both kinds of memory, helping to integrate the two together, reduce the activation of the target memory, and put the memory in its proper place in the timeline of your life story rather than have it continue to show up repeatedly as intrusive images, thoughts, emotions, and/or body sensations.
Make peace with your story ✧
Make peace with your story ✧
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NET provides a structure through which clients can process traumatic memories and establish a clear, coherent narrative of their lives.
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Through the lens of IFS, human consciousness is less like one unified entity than it is a community of “parts of self,” and that renegotiating the roles of, and relationships between, these parts can be a source of healing.
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This cutting edge modality, based in relational neuroscience and the concept of mentalization (the mental “maps” we create of our own and other’s minds), was developed by Dr. David Schnarch specifically to treat interpersonal trauma. This method uses visualizations, written narratives and imagined mental dialogues to process traumatic memories and transform internal representations of significant relationships. To my knowledge, I am currently the only therapist in Oregon with training in this method.
I have postgraduate training in, and regularly use, the following modalities for trauma treatment:
If you have more questions about my approach than I’ve answered here (or my answers only raise more questions!) feel free to schedule a consultation so we can talk about it!