IFS has been integral in helping my clients to become more resilient. self healers Resilience is the politicized, active, in-motion practice of hope and trust. IFS techniques integrate our mind, body, and spirit. IFS provides a trauma-informed framework to compassionately build our self esteem and self worth to build trusting and intimate connections in all aspects of our lives.

I believe that both the clinician and client alike are learning and unlearning the dominant forms of understanding and knowing. I believe therapy is the process in which we uncover how we’ve internalized intersecting forms of superiority and inferiority and how they’ve disempowered us. I help my clients develop strategies for empowerment by focusing on dismantling the internalized forms of hierarchy and privilege.

Much of our struggles with mental health is often tangled up with the same complexities about power, respect, dignity, cultural values, strengths, traditions, and our right to determine their destiny. My training has helped me to understand that our racial identity is profoundly influenced by cultural and systemic predispositions of racial superiority and inferiority. I believe that advocating for my clients both inside the office, and outside in the world is an ethical mandate I am honored to uphold.

I am deeply interested in interrogating cultural beliefs about wellness, mental illness, as well as power dynamics in the world of professional healing. In our work together, I will support you in challenging taboos, stigmas, and power dynamics about wellness and pathologizing mental illness.

Something I’ve arrived at over and over again is that we cannot separate mental wellness from the cultural and social context. Our society pumps us with messages and imperatives that teach us to seek guidance, reassurance, and praise externally. There’s an emptiness this creates in us that we are looking to be filled. We find ourselves stuck and trapped in our patterns and in our pain.

Through over two decades of studying buddhism, yoga, and meditation training and practice, I’ve learned that control is an illusion. We can’t lose something I didn’t really have in the first place. Mindfulness practices allow us to set our free. I use mindfulness and somatic practices to help clients begin the journey of turning inward in our bodies, surrendering control, and unconditionally loving themselves.

In both my personal and professional practices, I believe that connection to ancestral practices and rituals, as well as maintaining a connection to the earth is essential for self care and growth. I consider this decolonial approach coupled with select evidence based practices critical to wellness.

Our communities need to heal from interpersonal, intergenerational, and collective trauma. I approach trauma work just as I approach political work: systematically addressing the root causes of trauma, mental illness and social determinants of health. Drawing upon a spiritual and trauma-informed practice, I will guide you in uncovering intergenerational trauma to heal unconscious patterns and to find freedom in a life of possibilities.

Much of the suffering we experience as adults emerges in early childhood when we learned there is something wrong with us and our feelings. We’re labeled as “too much,” “sensitive,” “hyper,” “unfocused,” “distracted,”-- the list could go on and on. We learn to only show acceptable parts of ourselves, and keep the unacceptable parts out of sight and away from others. Being “good” means being quieter and smaller. Isolation and disconnection become strategies for our survival. The way we relate to others becomes focused on how we make them feel-- accommodating to what we perceive others need. As we transition into adulthood, this story becomes the one we continue to tell.

We might look for intimacy with people who we know aren’t right for us, but they are deeply struggling with addictions and trauma, and we alone can help them. We continue to focus so much on pleasing others, that we may begin to control them. We continue to suffer and justify our suffering because we’re needed. We often find ourselves stuck and in cycles of depression and despair.

During our work together, we begin the journey of turning inward, surrendering control, and unconditionally loving ourselves no matter what. The more we are open to our own inner experience, the more open we are to other people’s vastly different experiences​. Our work together will help you let people be who they are without needing to control or fix them. When ​we let go of control, and what we ​receive​ in return ​is unconditional​ joy, freedom, and contentment.

I help clients recover from trauma by helping them to tolerate painful emotions and experiences, and that eventually these experiences will come to an end. After you have been traumatized, you live in a different universe. It is virtually impossible to assimilate new experiences and our brains begin to tell us our world is unsafe and our bodies and our feelings are too. I will help you to accept and care for the the wounded parts inside yourself by using evidence based treatments like IFS and EMDR.