My integrative approach to
emotional wellness:
Lifestyle
Imagine we are building a house of wellness; lifestyle is the foundation. Hormonal balance, sleeping well, nutrition, body movement, and mindfulness practice are the building blocks. When we work together, I’ll gather information over your daily routines, offering loving and transformational suggestions along the way, and always provide support when you get stuck. We start here, since without a strong foundation, any tools you learn or trauma work we do will not be as sustainable if we do not address these basic pieces first.
My orientation to wellness is: wise woman herbalist, rest is resistance, health at every size, pleasure following, and expressive-arts based. This is not about suffering; rather it is an exploration of what works, and what your body needs!
DBT
As we continue to build our house of emotional wellness, DBT, or Dialectical Behavior Therapy, is our first floor. A psychoeducational approach that centers Mindfulness, Distress Tolerance, Emotional Regulation, and Interpersonal Effectiveness, DBT hands you the skills you need to make realistic shifts in your thinking. We all have old patterns of behaving, and disempowering mindsets that may need a shake up - DBT is there to support your ability to make choices that actually serve you.
Traditionally done in a group setting, DBT has a community component as we teach each other through sharing our experiences and emotions, and showing up in accountability. That being said, it’s supportive in individual work as well, and is fantastic preparation for doing deeper trauma processing.
Somatic Trauma Healing
Since we’ve laid our foundation and built the first floor, we’re now ready to add a roof, a balcony, and maybe even a garden to our house of emotional wellness - this is where somatic trauma healing comes in. Based in Somatic Experiencing (SE), this work serves to resolve trauma by utilizing polyvagal theory. Through the somatic lens, unprocessed trauma lives in the body until we allow it to let go. Trauma may be acute, chronic, societal or intergenerational; explicit or implicit. SE guides the client through mindfulness to explore emotion, sensation, images, or other internal stimuli that might want awareness, while maintaining a regulated nervous system.
Consciousness is described as the tip of an iceberg, with the hugeness of our unconscious material slowly steering down below without our awareness. When we sleep and dream, our unconscious speaks, giving us powerful guidance with which to navigate our waking life. Dream analysis, based in Jungian philosophy, offers a larger perspective of our lives through which we might find greater clarity and direction.
Additionally, we inherit patterns through our family lineage. It might be useful to unpack intergenerational trauma and resilience through collaborative charting which can trace several generations.
"Developing your bodily awareness and experiencing the world through it can be a radical act of self-reclamation.”
~ Kimberly Ann Johnson, Call of the Wild