Individual
Psychotherapy
I offer individual therapy exclusively to children, teens, and transitional aged youth (ages 16 - 25).
Areas of Focus
My practice focuses primarily on anxiety, trauma, emotion regulation difficulties, parent-child conflict, and giftedness. Other areas of my practice include low mood, depression, self-esteem, perfectionism, and self-harm and suicidality.
Anxiety
Trauma
Emotion Dysregulation
Parent-child
conflict
Giftedness
My Goal
My goal is to provide my clients with an approach to treatment that is evidence based, strikes the right balance of 'hard work' while still making sessions enjoyable and pleasant, and prioritizes feeling heard, understood, and safe.
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I have an eclectic and practical approach to therapy drawing on my experience and formal training in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Trauma-Focused CBT (TF-CBT), Dialectal Behaviour Therapy (DBT), Emotion-Focused Family Therapy (EFFT), Collaborative and Proactive Solutions (CPS), Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), Supportive Parenting of Anxious Childhood Emotions (SPACE), Brainspotting, polyvagal informed interventions, and mindfulness.
I tend to combine both top-down and bottom-up approaches; top-down and bottom-up refers to the parts of the brain that are being used in therapy to process information. Though this may not be interesting for everyone, neurophysiolgy is fascinating to me, so I will explain in a bit more detail the services I offer. Feel free to ignore the detail below, and suffice it to say that I offer a range of evidence-based therapeutic approaches!
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My Approach
The top-down approach is the most prevalent approach today in Western therapy, though bottom-up approaches are gaining popularity as new research about the brain is emerging. In top-down approaches, the therapist works with the thinking parts of the brain (the 'top' parts). This work relies heavily on language, reason, and logic. Top-down therapeutic approaches focus on changing the way we think to change how we feel. These approaches can be more difficult for children to engage in as the 'top' parts of our brains do not fully develop until our mid-twenties.
Bottom-up processing uses the lower parts of the brain, such as the brain stem and limbic system, to process sensory and emotional information. Our memories, automatic reflexes, and our body's internal alarm system and our perception of safety are found in the lower part of the brain. My work using a 'body-up', nervous system based approach, aims to create a nervous system that is more flexible, has a felt sense of safety, and is better able to maintain regulation. I incorporate bottom-up approaches grounded in polyvagal theory, as well as subcortical interventions such a Brainspotting, when appropriate.