About Therapy with Me

When Coping Skills Aren’t Enough, You Reach the Root

You’ve learned to manage.

Grounding techniques, breathing exercises, the tools that get you through a hard day. They help, and they matter. They were never meant to be the whole treatment.

Coping skills get you through what happened. They don’t process it.

That’s where a lot of therapy stops. It’s where I keep going, down to the source of the pain, so we can work it through together.

I spent more than twenty years in Child Protective Services in Alameda County, sitting on the other side of the table. People who have lived through hard systems tend to recognize that in me, and it’s often what brings them to my door.

You’ve lived the way you feel for a long time. You don’t have to keep living there.

Get in, get it out.

We Move Fast, and We Move at Your Pace

I believe in going after your deepest difficulties right away, because you’ve waited long enough to feel better.

And this is still your therapy, so we move at whatever speed you can hold. Some weeks that’s fast. Some weeks that’s slow. Both are the work.

We open each session by checking in on your week, so the most pressing things get handled first.

From there, we go to whatever you need to work on, whether it’s your career, your relationships, or the private things you’ve kept to yourself. Whatever it is, we get to it.

If there’s homework, we process it together. That’s often where you find qualities and strengths in yourself you couldn’t see before.

The Writing That Gets It Out of You

Trauma doesn’t only live in your memory.

Your brain and body hold onto what happened, long after the event is over.

Some people come to me as survivors of what happened to them. Others spend their careers around other people’s pain, like first responders and nurses, and the body absorbs and stores that too.

That’s why insight alone doesn’t settle it. You understand exactly what hurt you, and you still feel it running underneath everything.

So we get it out of you and onto paper.

The writing I use brings the parts of yourself you’ve buried back into the light. Once it’s on paper, it’s outside your body, where you can finally look at it and set it down.

Deep journal entries. Dream and nightmare entries.

We walk through those fires together, and we find the strengths in you the pain has been hiding.

You have to go through it. That’s the only way out.

And you don’t have to go through it alone.