Possible Modalities
My work is mostly informed by diverse theories in the field of 'somatic psychotherapy' ,'transgenerational trauma work', 'the Hakomi method', 'family systems therapy', 'family constellation work' and 'EMDR'. The choice of modalities depends on my clients’ wishes, boundaries, capacities and limitations.
Somatic Psychotherapy
Somatic Psychotherapy is a holistic approach that integrates the mind, body and spirit and can touch areas that traditional talk therapy alone cannot fully access. The underlying insight of this powerful healing work is that we enact self-feeling, identity, and connection with others through bodily means. After decades of experience somatic psychotherapists have come to see that a person's thoughts, attitudes, feelings, and beliefs can have an impact on physical functioning, while physical factors may positively or negatively affect a person’s mental and emotional state. Our bodies hold within them memories of everything we have ever experienced. Through our upbringing in our family systems, whether healthy or wounding/traumatic, we construct embodied patterns of feeling, sensation, expression, movement, and emotion through which we know ourselves and make relationships in the world. It is therefore essential that we include the body in treatment in order to transform those patterns that inhibit us from embracing our full healing potential. We know today that challenging and traumatic life experiences deprive us of our resources. Somatic Psychotherapy uses resourcing techniques that include breathing methods, sensation awareness practices, grounding activities and boundary exercises to help clients increase their balance, resiliency, options, creativity, and choice.
Transgenerational Trauma Work
Psychotherapy focused on healing transgenerational trauma places personal life experiences within the context of the larger family history.
Researchers and clinicians have become increasingly aware that the effects of trauma suffered by one generation--whether individually or collectively --are passed on to subsequent generations. Trauma can be transmitted through biological, physiological, environmental and social pathways. In transgenerational trauma work we attempt to Identify multigenerational behavioral patterns to show clients how their current issues may be rooted in previous generations as the result of historical trauma having been handed down to them.
Healing transgenerational trauma involves the mind, body, spirit, and some detective work to explore the client’s family history. By looking across the generations of your family for significant life events and relational patterns and unwinding them, we attend to the story, make room for emotional expression, and attune to the holding patterns in the body.
Evidence shows that when human beings cannot contain, digest and integrate their experience because it has been traumatically overwhelming, unbearable, unnameable and unthinkable, it is passed onto the next generation with chaotic urgency. In these cases children end up carrying what their parents or other family members could not as they vicariously identify with their parents’ suffering and assume responsibility to compensate for it. As a result they often experience feelings of depression, unresolved grief, anxiety, hypervigilance, guilt, psychic numbing, substance abuse and rage into their adulthood and keep passing these onto their own children again if they don’t break the transmission cycle beforehand.
Hakomi Therapy
Hakomi is a form of psychotherapy that combines mindfulness with a body-centered somatic approach. The method works with the client’s present, felt experience, as it is presented spontaneously, or deliberately and gently evoked by having them experiment with habitual patterns. It helps people change “core material,” which is composed of memories, images, beliefs, neural patterns and deeply held emotional dispositions. “Core Material” shapes the styles, habits, behaviors, perceptions and attitudes that define us as individuals. It works unconsciously, by organizing our responses to the major themes of life: safety, belonging, support, power, freedom, control. Our bodies reflect and store formative memories and the core beliefs they have generated, and at the same time provide significant access routes to core material. Once discovered, core material can be examined, processed, transformed and integrated into everyday life.
Family system therapy
Family systems therapy addresses specific issues that affect the psychological health of a family, such as major life transitions, traumatic experiences and intergenerational repetition of unhealthy cycles. It views the challenges of individuals in the context of the larger unit: the family! Family systems therapy attempts to identify the problems within a family dynamic. It uncovers the ideas and attitudes of the family system to show what may be going on with the entire family. Problems are seen as patterns or systems that need adjusting, as opposed to as something residing in a person in particular. Any change in the family system has an impact on its members and therefore any change in one member of the family affects both the family as a whole and each member individually.
Family constellation work
Family Constellation Work is an alternative therapeutic method which draws on elements of family systems therapy. The idea is that many of us unconsciously "take on" destructive familial patterns of anxiety, depression, anger, guilt, shame, substance abuse and even illness as a way of "belonging" in our families. Constellations allow us to break these harmful family patterns. A Family Constellation attempts to reveal a supposedly unrecognized systemic dynamic that spans multiple generations in a given family and to resolve the destructive effects of that dynamic. It gives us a deeper understanding as to why we feel the way we feel. First, we gain a felt sense of how we are still affected by the tragic events that remain unresolved in our families. Secondly, we literally step into a new image of feeling whole. After a constellation, we stand in a stronger and clearer place.
EMDR
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a psychotherapy treatment that facilitates the accessing and processing of traumatic memories and other adverse life experiences to bring these to an adaptive resolution. By using EMDR therapy people can experience the benefits of psychotherapy that can otherwise take years to make a difference. In successful EMDR therapy, the meaning of painful events is transformed on an emotional level.
EMDR helps relieve affective distress from disturbing memories, resolve present and future anticipated triggers, reformulate negative beliefs, and reduce physiological arousal.