My approach is:

TRAUMA-FOCUSED

• “Trauma” is now a buzzword in the therapy world; almost every therapist & their grandmother is now “trauma-informed.” To my mind, to be informed about trauma is the bare minimum.

• The mental health field has historically functioned as a tool of oppression & has failed to treat the people within its care (especially the most vulnerable people) with humility, gentleness, & an ever-present awareness that they have suffered greatly.

• Yes, I’m trauma-informed. I have been informed of trauma, witnessed it in action, and experienced it first-hand more than once.

• Yes, I’m trauma-trained. I can explain the way the brain and body store trauma & the ways in which pain & terror of the past imprint upon & distort the present.

• When I talk about trauma, I mean suffering. When I talk about suffering, what I mean is:

  • I will sit with you in the wreckage of your suffering. I will not ask you to ignore it or suppress it; I will not ask you to decoupage it with positivity or silver linings; and I will not ask you to flood yourself with your own grief so that I might witness you experiencing so-called “catharsis.”

  • Something like this & this & this.

ROOTED IN THE PRINCIPLES OF DISABILITY JUSTICE

• All bodies are good bodies, regardless of what they can produce.

• Nothing about us without us.

• My greatest teachers:

  • Sins Invalid, Mel Baggs, Lydia XZ Brown, Tobin Siebers, & Rosemarie Garland Thomson. (This is not a comprehensive list. It will continue to grow.)

  • People I had the privilege of supporting prior to becoming a therapist while I was employed at Erie Homes for Children and Adults, the Barber National Institute, Polk Center, and Hope Enterprises.

& strives to be ANTI-OPPRESSIVE

• Many of my clients have been extensively harmed by mental health professionals whose righteousness & egos swallowed all the air in the room.

• I am not the expert of you. You are the expert of you.

• To increase the likelihood that I ethically check myself before I wreck myself, my therapeutic practice includes:

  • Regular check-ins with you about how well the therapeutic space is meeting your needs & any adjustments we need to make

  • Ongoing self-reflection about the ways my life experience impacts the biases I might bring into the therapeutic relationship

  • Participation in continuing education classes that I choose not just to fulfill a two-year licensing renewal requirement — but because of genuine interest & a desire to learn more about a topic/subject

  • Consultation with other helping professionals whose ethics and areas of interest/expertise closely align with my own

  • My own personal therapy

    • As of October 2024, I am taking a break from participating in personal therapy; in its place, I am attending a variety of support groups focused on mental health topics related to my lived experience

This therapy practice is:

RADICALLY INFORMED by your clinician’s lived experience

& therefore:

GENDER EXPANSIVE DISABLED NEURODIVERGENT

This practice’s clients:

• Have inherent worth for the sole fact of being alive.

• Deserve dignity & respect.

Many of them also are:

• Neurodivergent.

• Gender expansive.

• Relationship anarchists.

Their mental health challenges include:

• Conflicted relationships with the body & mind.

• Difficulties completing “daily life tasks” like eating, showering, or doing laundry.

• Difficulties with attention & focus, getting started (especially when the task feels daunting or really boring), breaking a Big Thing into more manageable smaller things, and making decisions.

• Hypervigilance.

• Chronic fatigue.

• Chronic/recurrent suicidal ideation.

• Chronic self-doubt and gaslighting of own perceptions & experiences.

• Dissociation: They’re not quite real; the world’s not quite real; the mind floats, is filled with static, flits, shape-shifts.

• Feeling disconnected from a sense of self OR having an ever-shifting sense of self.

• Difficulties understanding the intentions of others.

• Burnout.

These challenges can be attributed to:

• Experiences of abuse and neglect beginning at a very young age.

• Enduring chronic & physically inescapable relational trauma across the lifespan in various contexts (including the home, school, and community environments).

• White-knuckling their way through an overwhelming world while coping with sensory sensitivities (that they might not even know they have) in whatever way they can.

• Living in an ableist cultural context that has been & continues to be insidiously marred by white supremacy.

If This Is You — Let’s Get You Where You Want to Go

Your therapy is about you.
It’s not about me, & I don’t want it to be.

The process of change is built around your sense of trust and safety: within yourself, our relationship, and the therapeutic space. This guides the pace and direction of therapy, where we will work together to avoid re-traumatization by limiting your exposure to “too much,” “too fast,” “too soon” during every appointment.

We will dip our toes your sadnesses & griefs, longings & lonelinesses — maybe even your past or present experiences with terror and despair.

We will celebrate all the ways you’ve skillfully and resourcefully kept yourself alive.

When joy presents itself, we will witness it — notice its shape & color & sound — build a blueprint to allow your body to remember how to embody that joy again & again.

Our work together is likely to include:

• Exploring and challenging the way you experience yourself and your worth.

• Careful examination of the way you navigate societal expectations or the lengths to which you go to adhere to or disobey “the rules.”

• Honoring your body’s need to move as an innate way of responding to and managing emotions that sometimes escape the spoken word.

• Use of art or music to give shape, color, sound, texture, and temperature to feelings or experiences that challenge or resist meaning (some examples of the work that we might do together can be found here under the headings “Section I,” “Section II,” and “Section III”).

• Discussions of various systems of oppression — specifically, the ones with the greatest impact on you in the present & the past.

What to Expect During an Appointment

An appointment with me will always include:

• An emphasis on obtaining consent.

  • Before I ask questions that may feel invasive or elicit shame.

  • Before I self-disclose information that I believe to be relevant to the therapeutic relationship or your therapeutic work (I do this sparingly — but I’m happy to field any personal questions you might have about me).

• Pauses & slowing down.

  • My thoughts move quickly, change the channel midway through a thought, and clamor over one another as they happen all at once — I need a moment to sort them all out.

• Inquiries about feelings, emotions, and sensations.

  • “What are you noticing?”

  • “What does that mean about the world? other people? you?”

  • “If we drop down into the body, what’s going on there?”

• Use of imagination.

  • Where feelings live in your body, how you’d experience them if they had various sensory components.

  • “I’m getting a mental image of…”

It is also likely to include:

• Hit phrases & concepts from the 90s and 00s:

  • Long hair don’t care.

  • Checking oneself before wrecking oneself.

  • Taking a chill pill.

  • “Cool beans.”

• Appearances from my canine co-workers, Rocko (she/her) & Camille (she/her).