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Many of my clients feel frustration, confusion, and shame when they have difficulty tolerating certain social interactions, crowded places, or other stimuli that seem fine to others. Usually, these are highly sensitive people, also known as HSP’s. In our culture being “sensitive” is often seen as being weak, too particular, or too emotional. It’s rare…

 I’ve been a therapist for nearly 2 decades and have trained in and studied quite a few types of therapy. I’ve settled on a few that work with the way I think and that the clients that see me tend to find helpful. I am a trauma/EMDR therapist and trained in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and…

Sometimes people come to therapy with the motivation to make the people around them change, since they are the ones causing the client’s problems. While this is an easy goal to relate to (wouldn’t it be nice if people were less annoying and just did the sensible things??), this isn’t how therapy works. Psychotherapy is…

I think a lot of us have moments when we realize that we are not understood by our peers, teachers, and even – or especially by family. This experience of “otherness” and isolation has a long-lasting impact on our sense of self, our sense of worth, and our belief in our abilities, our ability to…

Just put down your phone. There I said it! Often in conversations with clients, there are complaints of feeling unable to focus on tasks like they used to, a general sense of unease that might include trouble getting to sleep, muscle tension, and feeling generally stressed and unsettled. Previously prolific readers are finding it hard…

Anxious about an interaction or event coming up? Just put on a lab coat and grab your clipboard!  A fun intervention that I use with clients is to imagine that when they are going to do something that may provoke social anxiety or avoidance is to use the posture of “doing an experiment” instead of…

My work as a therapist focuses mostly on helping people recover from neglectful, or traumatic childhoods. Beyond PTSD, one of the manifestations of early life trauma tends to be the way codependent patterns and behaviors show up in relationships. Codependency is not a mental health diagnosis, rather it is a pattern of behavior that causes,…

EMDR got a big boost in public awareness a few years back when Oprah interviewed Prince Harry, and he allowed an EMDR session to be videotaped and shown. I will confess I did not watch this but did see that Inside Edition covered it and noted that actor Evan Rachel Wood is also a client…

EMDR is described as an 8-phase, 3-pronged treatment based on the “Adaptive Information Processing Model” (AIP). So what the heck does that mean? The AIP model states that the brain is wired to adaptively (positively) process all the sensory information it gets, but that sometimes an experience can get “stuck” with all the information present…

It’s a real thing. This is the therapeutic practice known as “Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy”, which employs back-and-forth eye movements while recalling traumatic events to reduce distress when the event is remembered (desensitization) and convince the brain that the event is no longer something to be afraid of or preoccupied with (reprocessing). In…

In a previous post, I discussed the ways our thoughts and bodies impact our experience of anxiety. In this post, I want to cover the habits and behaviors that many of us engage in that increase anxiety. Caffeine and other Substances Number one in my book is caffeine misuse or even use at all, if…

In the previous post, I discussed the impact of thoughts on anxiety, and now want to discuss the part 2 of the misery trifecta – the body. In recent years, therapy interventions that focus on the body have become much more popular. Many people have heard of the book The Body Keeps The Score by…

I’ve been a therapist for quite a few years now, and I will admit it is only within the last few that I have really gotten skilled at treating anxiety, and anxiety-related problems like insomnia and panic. The big game changer has been the increased focus on somatic, or body-based techniques. Maybe it was my future…

It’s a controversial statement, obviously. But one recent week, I found myself sitting with three different clients and these were the words that played in my mind. As a psychotherapist who treats people suffering from the sequelae of difficult childhoods, I see day in and day out how harmful parenting impacts people. I’m a mother…