My study of psychotherapeutic interventions is bolstered by my prior life experience as a music producer. Working as a musician and business owner with other artists in a creative industry demanded incisive, solution-oriented thinking.  Sensitivity to artists’ expectations and vulnerabilities was paramount to successfully completing a project. I call upon this experience with my clients and believe that every situation and person is unique demanding an original and creative perspective.

Trauma-informed Contemplative Psychotherapy 

I use the term “Trauma-Informed Contemplative Psychotherapy” to describe my method of intervention. Trauma overwhelms our capacity to cope and leaves a lasting impression that presents as a network of memory, sensation, emotions, and negative beliefs. Traumatic memory is easily triggered and impacts our sense of safety and belonging in the world. While most of us are familiar with “big T Trauma”-- life-threatening situations such as disasters or chronic abuse and neglect-- psychologists also describe “small t trauma,” which can result from victimization such as bullying, any kind of discrimination, living in poverty, etc.  While it often goes unrecognized, small t trauma can cause tremendous psychic and emotional pain and have a lifelong impact. The goal of trauma-informed intervention is to reprocess traumatic memory and help the client find new associations that do not connote maladaptive emotions and behavior. Interventions such as EMDR and Internal Family Systems are ideally suited to reprocessing traumatic memory.

Contemplative psychotherapy or the use of mindfulness as an intervention is a two-way street. Not only do I encourage clients to practice mindful awareness, I use it myself in sessions. It allows me to be present in the moment and listen without judgment, to practice compassion, and approach problems with a beginner’s mind.

Reprocessing and Transforming Traumatic Memory

Our developmental attachment relationships and experience influence the behavioral patterns of our present day lives, whether we have suffered trauma with a “big T” or a “small t.” The goal of therapy is to help clients recognize the behavioral patterns that influence relationships, anxiety, and emotional experience and find more adaptive solutions that help them realize the life and values they want to live by.

The Western medical perspective can tend to stigmatize the client by pigeon-holing them with a diagnosis and the idea that an illness prevails that must be cured. I prefer to adopt a more holistic perspective. Chronic stress creates a strain that calls upon the system to devise coping strategies to survive. Often these strategies, especially the ones we adopt instinctively in childhood, fail to serve us, or worse, are the source of maladaptive behavior that creates problems in our lives as adults. Ultimately the system wants to heal itself, and it is my goal to help clients discover that they can let go of what is no longer working for them.

There are vast correlations between Eastern philosophy and Western psychotherapy. The Buddhists and yogis believe that the endless cycle of negative karma can be changed by positive karma. Neuroscience has come to the same conclusion by demonstrating the plasticity of neural pathways. Maladaptive behavioral patterns and responses, which often take hold of our lives can be transformed and rewritten. It is my goal to collaborate with my clients so that they can realize this transformative experience.