Complex and systemic trauma often impacts our sense of agency and connection and create feelings of helplessness and disempowerment. Healing from trauma involves nurturing our connection to ourselves and others and reclaiming our sense of agency and dignity. We can do so by learning to tune into our sensations, emotions, urges, thoughts, recognize our needs and desires, and make choices that align with our values and capacity.

I prioritize collaboration and honor your agency and wisdom in our work together. While I offer my expertise, you are the expert of your system, your body, and your life. I welcome your feedback about what is working and what is not. I am open to repairing when ruptures happen.

What this would look like in sessions: checking in to see how you feel about the direction we’re going in, checking for your capacity when approaching intense areas, apologizing when I make a mistake, doing regular check ins about how therapy is feeling for you.

Imagination and creativity are powerful and instrumental tools in reclaiming agency and embodied safety in our lives. While traumatic experiences often keep us (or parts of us) in the past and/or highlight external constraints, connecting with our creativity allows us to fill up our cups, expand our emotional bandwidth, and enhance our sense of connection.

Through the power of imagination, analogies and metaphors can offer a road to empowerment and insight, while role-playing and guided imagery can unearth new perspectives and deepen understanding.

What this would look like in sessions: using symbols and imagery to externalize your emotions and thoughts, role-playing parts and protective patterns.

I draw from Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, a model that views individuals as consisting of multiple parts, with their own perspectives, roles, feelings, thoughts, and sensations, along with a core Self with distinct qualities that can lead and heal our burdened parts.

Many of our parts carry burdens as a result of traumatic experiences, leading to them carrying out protective roles (e.g. people pleasing, avoiding, numbing, intellectualizing) that might not serve you anymore. In IFS, we work to access your Self energy and build connections with your parts, listening to their experiences, healing their pains, and releasing them from their roles.

What this would look like in sessions: reflecting using parts language, clarifying and exploring a part’s role in the system, supporting parts that need witnessing, navigating tension between different parts.

We respond to traumatic experiences not just in our heads but also in body sensations, nervous system patterns, and physiological impulses. Tuning into our body facilitates deeper understanding of our experiences, transformation of shame-based responses, and clarification of our values.

What this would look like in sessions: doing body scans, slowing down and tracking specific sensations and impulses, practicing mindfulness, exploring somatic exercises.