I always lead with the same question:
What is the deeper conflict and how do we resolve it?
Through my grounded use of psychodynamic psychotherapy, Somatic Experiencing®, and Pain Reprocessing Therapy; I’m here to help you tackle a wide variety of blocks to your wellbeing.
Whether it falls under chronic physical symptoms, emotional instability, or an over-attunement to others at personal cost to yourself, I want to help you.
My interest in therapy was sparked by my discovery of the work of Dr. John Sarno and my subsequent experience as his patient.
I suffered from chronic and disabling back pain starting in my teen years followed by a multitude of other chronic physical symptoms. My daily life became a constant battle with my own body. I sought help from various doctors and specialists but found no relief.
Dr. Sarno's understanding that pain, along with many other symptoms, can be generated by the brain was life-changing. He diagnosed me with TMS (Tension Myoneural Syndrome) and my path to healing began as I recognized the emotional roots of my symptoms along with the behavioral patterns that further fueled them.
While the name given to these symptoms has changed over the years by those who followed up on Dr. Sarno's work (TMS, Mindbody Syndrome, Psychophysiological symptoms, Neuroplastic symptoms) the same revolutionary idea applies — physical symptoms in various systems of the body can be generated by the brain due to causes including repressed emotion and an overactive threat response.
That experience taught me how our bodies speak through symptoms, and how much we can release when we're given the somatic and psychological support to press into our pain and allow it to make us healthier.
Healing isn’t always a linear process; but you can lessen time spent treading water.
If you’re ready to explore therapy, reach out.
Get In TouchI work and draw from a few key approaches:
A body-based approach that recognizes the body's innate capacity for healing. SE, informed by Polyvagal Theory, recognizes that our moods, perceptions, and moment to moment experience in the world are shaped by what is happening in our physiology, most specifically our nervous system. It provides a map to help people utilize awareness of bodily sensation to move out of chronic 'shut down' and fight-flight states into ease and social engagement. I have found SE tools to be very useful in working with both shock traumas and more common experiences of depression and anxiety.
A body‑based approach to how our survival responses impact the nervous system after trauma, chronic stress or past overwhelm. SE works by helping us identify and complete thwarted survival strategies; the fight, flight, freeze or fawn responses that got stuck as your nervous system's default stance.
I've completed the full 3-year training and have received the Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner Certificate (SEP) since 2021. I also serve as a teaching assistant in SE trainings and am approved to provide personal sessions to SE students at the beginner and intermediate levels.
PRT is a system of psychological techniques focused on retraining how the brain responds to signals from the body, including pain. According to the CDC, about 25% of Americans are currently living with chronic pain. Most of them receive medical treatment that is not informed by the neuroscience research of the past 30 years showing that chronic pain, along with various other symptoms, can result from the brain misinterpreting safe signals from the body as danger.
I have found PRT to be an excellent supplement to emotion-focused work to resolve chronic physical symptoms (Neuroplastic symptoms). I have found PRT to be extremely helpful for my clients whose worlds have gotten smaller and smaller due to fear of various symptoms including chronic pain, GI symptoms, and panic.
Psychodynamic and relational therapy ask: What did you learn about connection, safety, worth, and visibility, and how are those lessons still showing up now? We look at how early experiences have formed habitual responses, how emotion and body, desire and defences, have joined forces.
In our sessions we'll pay attention not only to what you say, but how you feel and how your body speaks. We'll examine the ways you've learned to adapt, and then gently test how you might respond differently. Because the body remembers, the heart remembers, the pattern remembers. And when we bring clarity and intent to them, change becomes possible.
Notable Professional Influences
Dr. John Sarno
A rehabilitation physician at NYU who proposed Tension Myositis/Myoneural Syndrome (TMS), arguing that much chronic back and musculoskeletal pain is driven by unconscious emotional conflict rather than structural damage.
Nicole J. Sachs, LCSW
A psychotherapist and former Sarno patient who developed the "JournalSpeak" expressive-writing method to surface repressed emotion and help resolve neuroplastic chronic pain and anxiety.
Dr. Howard Schubiner
An internist and mind–body medicine researcher whose Unlearn Your Pain program treats chronic primary pain as a reversible neuroplastic process through education, emotional awareness, and brain retraining.
Dr. Patricia Coughlin
A clinical psychologist and leading teacher of Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy whose books show how focused, time-limited emotional work can create deep and lasting character change.
Dr. Allan Abbass
A psychiatrist and major ISTDP researcher whose clinical trials suggest that intensive, emotion-focused treatment can reduce symptoms and health-care use in people with medically unexplained or functional somatic complaints.
Dr. Robert Glover
A marriage and family therapist and author whose work focuses on men and the patterns of conflict-avoidance and approval seeking that keep them stuck.
Dr. Gabor Maté
A Canadian physician and author whose work on trauma, stress, and addiction — including When the Body Says No and The Myth of Normal — traces how early relational wounds and chronic stress imprint the body and can later appear as illness and self-sabotage.
More Questions?
Check out the FAQs, and more about what working together would be like here, or get in touch via the button below.