An Integrative Approach to Therapy: Tending Mind, Body & Soul

My work as a therapist is rooted in psychodynamic theory, which emphasizes the unconscious or what is not ordinarily obvious in our understanding of how we experience life and behave. This means we move slowly and intentionally, spending meaningful time understanding your history—and how the patterns, adaptations, and stories you’ve carried shape your life and inform your present reasons for seeking therapy. 

In the first five sessions, I assess what’s happening in the mind, body, and soul.  These sessions forge the therapeutic relationship, which is recognized as the strongest predictor of positive outcomes in psychotherapy.  Our relationship thus becomes a vehicle for repatterning maladaptive behaviors, cognitive distortions, and trauma-informed narratives.

In practice, I use psychoeducation as a primary intervention to provide context for why your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors manifest the way they do. My extensive history in somatic work as a licensed massage therapist and yoga teacher informs my orientation to the emotional process stored in the body, enabling a holistic approach to understanding your whole story. I offer breathwork and mindfulness meditations to support nervous system regulation, increase emotional tolerance, and deepen self-awareness. Drawing from attachment theory, polyvagal theory, and trauma-informed care, we explore how your patterns of connection, protection, and meaning-making formed—and how they can soften and evolve. Therapy becomes a space where insight meets embodiment, and where lasting change is supported through both cognitive understanding and felt experience.

Let Life Break You Open.

Tuning the human instrument with curiosity and compassion.

Mind: Our self-concept is informed by our earliest relational impressions, beginning with primary caregivers and evolving through formative friendships and romantic partnerships. Dysfunction in the childhood home, combined with both overt and subtle trauma, can lead to a fragmentation of the Self as a means of psychological survival. When left unattended over time, these experiences often contribute to instability in the mind, shaped by self-deprecating beliefs, anger, grief, and anxiety. Tending the mind thus becomes a practice of gently disentangling cognitive distortions that have been unintentionally reinforced, allowing for increased self-esteem, emotional flexibility, and the rewriting of a more honest, compassionate inner narrative.

Body: The body holds more than muscles and bones—it carries memory, unprocessed emotion, and the imprint of lived experience. Areas of chronic tension often contain valuable information that can support meaningful therapeutic insight and change. Healing, at its core, involves integrating the parts of ourselves that trauma, disrupted coping, and unmet emotional needs across time have fragmented. I view the body as a second brain—an innate source of wisdom—and believe that when we become more fully embodied, we gain access to greater clarity, integrity, and alignment with our deeper truth. In practice, my goal is to help clients strengthen the bridge between mind and body so change can be both understood and felt.

Soul:  At an introductory level, soul can be understood as the power of the breath and its movement in and out of the body. The ancient Greeks referred to the diaphragm—the primary muscle of respiration—as Phren, recognizing it as an intersection of mind, spirit, and heart consciousness. How we breathe directly informs our capacity to regulate the nervous system, quiet the “monkey mind,” and return to the body. A chronic disconnection from the breath often reflects a deep entanglement with mental overactivation, which can perpetuate anxiety and contribute to chronic pain. Re-establishing a conscious relationship with the breath becomes a gateway to presence, regulation, and inner coherence.