My Specialty

I help women, students, and young adults who identify as emotionally sensitive. You may struggle with perfectionism, anxiety, depression, losing yourself in others, setting boundaries, and trauma. You feel emotions deeply, intense emotions arise more often than you like, and it takes them longer to reset.  This heightened sensitivity is your super power! It is the source of your creativity, your passion, and your intuition! But in our culture, it can often be met with criticism leading us to feel as though we don’t belong. We learn to push away our emotions to gain acceptance, only to feel more isolated. My clients want to step out of conditioning based in shame, patriarchy, and trauma and learn to trust their gifts, emotions, and intuition!

With mindfulness, somatic therapies, and DBT, I will help you stop self-sabotaging, get comfortable with the experience of your emotions, and guide you in tuning into your wants, your needs, your limits, and your values. I can help you let go of others’ expectations of you so that you can live the life YOU want to live and trust yourself above all others.

If you feel as if others don’t truly see you and you’re tired of being judged or you’re losing yourself in others, please contact me. Helping people rediscover the gifts of sensitivity is my life’s work. The sense of freedom, home, and wholeness you want is possible!  Inclusive and Safe Environment.  All are Welcome.

The Three Values I Live and Work By:

Balance

Balance is important to all aspects of life, including in our work together.  I may ask you to consider things in a new way; encourage change in your life; challenge you to feel emotions you rather avoid, but my goal is to honor where you are at in your personal journey.  This means validating that your emotions make sense, knowing that you are doing the best you can and that no one else could do a better job living your life, and empowering you to take the lead on your journey of healing.

“A child may try to help a butterfly to emerge by breaking open its chrysalis.  Usually the butterfly doesn’t benefit from this.  Any adult knows that the butterfly can only emerge in its own time, that the process cannot be hurried.”

Kabat-Zinn, J., Ph.D. (2009). Full Catastrophe Living: using the wisdom of your body and mind to face stress, pain, and illness (15th ed.). New York, NY: Bantam Dell.

Integrity

“Courage over comfort”

We often prioritize others’ feelings of comfort over our own emotions, needs, and values.  It can feel more comfortable and safe to live our lives from a guiding principle to ‘not make any waves.’  We may smooth over conflicts to prevent rejection, deny our emotions to appease others, belie our entire selves to gain a false sense of certainty and control.  Living our lives from this conditioned and fear based perspective, we present a false impression of our true nature.  And over time, we lose our sense of self.  We may question our belonging, feel as though we’re hiding behind various masks, or feel a general sense of emptiness at our core.   It takes a commitment to courage to live our lives with the intention to be true to ourselves and recognize our inherent goodness.  When living from a place of integrity, you feel a sense of trust in yourself and in the world, a sense of freedom, and a sense of belonging or home within yourself.  I am committed to walking at your side as you learn to uncover and honor your true nature.

(2019). Retrieved December 30, 2019, from https://brenebrown.com/videos/anatomy-trust-video/

Compassion

Too often compassion is limited to others and not the self.  We make efforts to be gentle, patient, and kind with others while we criticize and have impossible expectations for ourselves.  Many minimize their challenges and losses believing that ‘others have it worse,’ and yet comparing our lives to others does little to motivate or inspire.  All of us have felt pain in its various forms; all of us have faced loss, big and small.  We are all, at times, “astonished by the generous measure of loss that is conferred upon even the most average life.”  You are not alone.  In fact, it is something that connects us all.   I believe that in your struggles, you have shown a strength that may go unnoticed, but the perseverance you have manifested deserves to be recognized and appreciated.  My goal is to acknowledge the strength that you have shown time and time again.  I want to sit with you as you realize that strength in yourself so that you may be caring and gentle with yourself.  I want you to be truly compassionate with yourself as you are with so many others.

Whyte, D. (2015). Consolations: the solace, nourishment and underlying meaning of everyday words. Langley, WA: Many Rivers Press.