Why therapy?
Healing only happens in relationship
Our thoughts and feelings affect our physical well-being, and our physical and spiritual well-being impacts our thought processes and emotions and so on. We also each have a unique way of seeing and being in the world. Often we are unconsciously conditioned to create a false self as a way to adapt to our families and our environments to maintain a sense of connectedness and belonging–however distorted this form of connection might be. Trauma further fragments us from ourselves and distorts our way of relating to others and to ourselves. As we reach adulthood, our ways of surviving in childhood often become maladaptive to our new environments and begin to cause us problems like anxiety, depression, isolation, and somatic issues. For many of us, underlying the dread and anxiety to find happiness, meaning, and fulfillment in life are the questions we can’t bear to face—Can I be loved for who I really am? And where do I belong?
My therapeutic approach is primarily relationally and existentially psychodynamic. This means that through our relationship, I will partner to support and guide you with gentle curiosity and empathic attunement to help you explore your fear, anxiety, desires, dreams, and existential dread that are keeping you from living the life you want and becoming the person you are made to be. Through somatic modalities such as mindfulness, body scanning, breathwork, and bottom up approaches (which means moving our bodies as if we feel something and then our emotion reflects our motion!), you will learn to tune into how your body is feeling, you will have greater capacity to live in the present moment, to tolerate distress, and repair the mental processes that can keep you resilient during stress. As a multicultural and multi-ethnic person, I also will work navigating an intergenerational, racial, and cross-cultural landscape. For me, the work of therapy is to create good enough safety where you can tell you story of harm and loss. The relationship we build will allow us to explore and bring awareness to adaptive patterns that are now contributing to dis-ease and begin to re-integrate your mind, body and emotions through the reparative experiences between us that you can carry into the rest of you life. You can begin to face your fears and limitations and have more agency in choosing what it is you want for yourself. My hope is to help you embrace the dignity and value you have, which does not need to be earned, to learn how to become human in a dehumanizing world, to live creatively through embodying your gifts, uniqueness, and finally to learn healthy relational interdependence with your friends, family, and community.