HOW I WORK

Three doors into what words can't reach.

Many of my clients arrive after years of talk therapy that didn't quite reach where the wound lives. That's because childhood trauma is recorded in implicit memory — in the body, in reflex, in symbol — before language arrives. The parts holding it kept doing what once helped them survive, long after those strategies became a burden. My work uses modalities that bypass the analytical mind to meet those parts directly and bring them home.

  • Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing was developed by psychologist Dr. Francine Shapiro in 1987 and has become one of the most well-researched trauma therapies in the world.


    The premise: when a traumatic event happens, your nervous system can be so overwhelmed that your memory network fails to process and integrate it. The moment becomes "frozen in time." Later, when you're triggered by a similar image, smell, sound, or feeling, you don't only remember the original event — you relive it, often without consciously knowing why.


    EMDR works by directly affecting how the brain stores and processes memory, unfreezing the traumatic material and allowing you to integrate it. Over time, the memory remains but no longer feels like reliving the wound. The belief that took root in the moment of trauma — "I am stupid," "I am unlovable," "the world is unsafe" — gets gently replaced with a more accurate one.

    EMDR is the spine of my trauma work. It's effective for PTSD, complex trauma, anxiety, panic, and the persistent patterns that have their roots in early experience.

  • Brainspotting is a related modality, often used alongside EMDR. Developed by David Grand, it's built on the observation that certain eye positions correspond to specific "trauma capsules" stored in the brain — and that focusing on these positions can give us access to material that's otherwise difficult to reach.

    Where EMDR works through bilateral eye movement, Brainspotting works through a fixed eye position. Together, they form a more complete toolkit: some material responds to one, some responds to the other. I often use both in the same client's work, depending on what we're working with.

    Brainspotting is effective for PTSD and complex trauma, attachment wounds, dissociation, emotion regulation difficulties, depression, anxiety, and addiction.

  • Some material doesn't surface through eyes or words. It surfaces through hands, through images, through what gets made.


    In expressive therapy I work with sand play and symbol work — creating with objects, miniature figures, sand, and gesture. The premise is the same one that underlies the body-based work: there are things the unconscious is trying to say that the analytical mind isn't yet ready to hear. Bypass the ego, and the material has a way of surfacing on its own.

    This work isn't about artistic skill. It's about what shows up when the analytical mind stops curating. For some clients, expressive therapy is what finally gives a wordless feeling a shape — and gives us something we can work with together.