An initial therapy appointment is known as an “intake session.” I’ll ask you a lot of open-ended questions to better understand all your different concerns about your thoughts, emotions, behaviors, physical symptoms, and a wide variety of factors that may be contributing to or impacted by your current situation - such as the relational patterns in your family of origin and what your relationships currently look like with your family, partner, child(ren), friends, and coworkers.

I’ll also ask you about your goals and we’ll start talking about how we can accomplish those together.

Note: when it comes to talking about the trauma(s) you want to process and heal from, I’ll ask some surface level questions to get a general idea of what we’ll be working on, but we definitely won’t do a deep dive into any of that during the initial session.

For the first few sessions, we focus on improving day-to-day functioning so you can manage any symptoms you’re experiencing of depression, anxiety, or PTSD.

I see coping strategies as weedwackers - if your current mental/emotional state feels like a garden completely overgrown with weeds, these will help you feel a lot better pretty quickly. Buuut, they obviously don’t address the deeper issues.

Before we start pulling that sh*t out at the root, we’ll also spend time working with any parts of you that have hesitations or concerns about beginning the real trauma work. The amount of time we spend in this phase depends on how many tools you already have in your toolbox and how well they are currently working for you, as well as on what your parts need to feel safe enough to proceed to the next phase. 

As your day-to-day feels more manageable, we transition to identifying and working to heal the root cause(s) of your emotional or relational challenges. We’ll talk in more detail about traumas or other impactful experiences you are already aware of and wanting to process and heal from.

I will also help you to identify any negative “emotional learnings” you may not currently be aware of that are contributing to your current struggles.

Then we will begin re-processing: collaborating with all your different parts to help your brain get “unstuck,” and ultimately allowing you to experience a shift from feeling broken, stuck, or insignificant to building a secure and positive sense of self, cultivating trust in others and authenticity in relationships, and finding the confidence and motivation to work towards the life you really want.