Personal Growth Counseling
for Helpers and Healers
in Portland, Oregon
Balance giving and receiving.
It’s on you.
You’ve been the person who makes it alright for others – and chances are it’s been like that for a long time. The one who has it together, jumps in when there’s an emergency, can set their own feelings aside because of a greater cause or because of someone who is more in need. Yep that’s you, right? People compliment you on how strong, compassionate, wise, or resilient you are. You might be a counselor or social worker yourself, or a medical professional, or another kind of alternative healer, coach, space-holder, community leader, body worker, transformational process facilitator, or even just someone who people always turn to for help – one of us idealistic, sensitive, well-meaning people who intellectually understand that we’re not supposed to single-handedly save everyone, but we’ve given it a good try at least once.
This level of competence and contribution can even feel good and fill you with meaning… until it doesn’t so much any more. You might start missing yourself, wishing for long breaks even though you love what you do, growing resentful, or burning out.
As helpers, we’re often driven by deep empathy and knowing human suffering first-hand. You may have come a long way in your journey already – tons of therapy, spiritual work, psychedelics, gone to hundreds of workshops and retreats, you might do embodiment work, meditation, and are highly self-aware. Or, you may just be discovering personal growth and are curious about self-improvement. Either way: welcome.
I know that you struggle, too.
Facilitating and supporting people in predictable settings is likely your comfort zone. Being vulnerable yourself unplanned out in the world – much harder. Even while people look up to you in some ways, you might actually be quite socially anxious, or still be learning about your boundaries, have people-pleasing tendencies, regularly get depressed and lonely, berate yourself harshly for your imperfections, spin out in existential dread, or get into these painful power struggles in your personal life.
You know you can’t go to just anybody for support. You want someone with depth, skill, and maturity.
You can be met.
I particularly love working with people who already feel committed to personal growth. I’ve actively been on this journey for most of my life and yes, it does seem never-ending to me! But that’s not a bad thing, in my mind. We never get “perfect” - we just keep writing new chapters in the book of discovery of what it’s like to be fully human. And from where I am now, this an interesting, awe-inspiring, even sacred process.
Some have called this “growth mindset”.
What if you could be someone who has grown deep roots into their self-worth? Then your confidence is not dependent on someone appreciating what you provide or approving of you. Instead, you know who you are, what you want, and how to have your own needs met in relationship. Your boundaries are clear and solid – and you feel empowered to protect yourself as needed. Your self-care is a natural expression of loving yourself and your emotions are your friends. You can take in the love of others. You wake up in the morning with a Yes to life, to yourself, and to your loved ones. You become someone who feels genuine belonging and your vitality sparks your authentic creative contribution to the world.
You’re ready to do the deep work.
When you come to sessions, you may not want to report about your week or approach the issue in a roundabout way. You are looking to use the time to roll up your sleeves and face a particular stuckness you’re experiencing. You know yourself well.
If you’re already strong in your capacity to mindfully track your body and be grounded in your integrated Self while accessing challenging emotional experience, great! I’m happy to jump right in and be with you in the depths of your process. And if not, that’s okay. We’ll start by building a foundation of feeling safe in your body, so that you can have confidence that our explorations will not throw you into overwhelm. Building this foundation might take a bit of time, and there’s no shame in that. It will be more sustainable than cathartically plunging right into your traumas.
I will be guiding you into a deeper relationship with your body’s unconscious and implicit processes, from which your emotional material, core beliefs and attitudes will naturally emerge. We’re going to meet those at the level of felt sense, not only thought. Mindful presence, compassion, and new experiences of relationship will reorganize your inner world. From there, you will write a new story of your life.
If you want change at the level of your sense of self, that’s what I’m about.
What we can work on together:
giving and receiving
boundaries
inner critic and impostor syndrome
what’s in the way of satisfying relationships
compassion fatigue and burnout
being seen
shame
having emotional and physical needs, and “selfishness”
spiritual growth and existential issues
undoing “nice” conditioning
being in the body
connecting to anger in a safe way
grieving as a natural process
self-compassion and mindfulness
… or anything else
that you feel lies in the direction
of you living a full life!
Go ahead and matter.
Frequently Asked Questions
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What I'm hearing in this question is that in your experience with therapists, they have spanned the range from helpful to unhelpful, right? I know. And if you get into therapy again, you want to make sure it's worth it for you?
I think the best way to assess if I will work for you is to meet with me. From my perspective, here are some of my good qualities:
I relate to you like we're humans together, not like I'm a neutral observer. I feel things with you and I'm genuinely curious to know you.
I've done my work and have significant embodied comfort with a full range of emotional and physical experience. I easily stay grounded and connected when things are hard.
I'm anchored in a deep trust in the universe, which allows me to be creative with the human experience.
I am secure in knowing myself and being connected to myself, so I'm comfortable with interpersonal differences.
I'm intensely present-moment direct-experience oriented.
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I think of boundaries as a capacity for being in touch with yourself enough to know what's right for you and what's not right for you - and then being able to assert this truth moment to moment.
Boundaries are the point of contact through which we communicate with the world about ourselves.
Difficult life circumstances often teach us to not be in touch with ourselves and to not express our true needs. We end up confused and feeling either too open or too closed, but insecure in either case.
I slow things down and help make conscious the patterns that run unconsciously in your relationships. Through mindful awareness and somatic practices, we evoke responses that are part of your "operating system". I help you cultivate your self-connection and the discernment to know what is right for you. You get to decide how big of a boundary is right for you at any point. Along the way, we process fears and past wounding around knowing your truth and being able to assert it successfully. I use body-based experiential activities and role-play as a big part of creating awareness and shifting old patterns.
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Trauma is not what happened to you... it's the effects of what happened then, in the now.
Trauma is when we get overwhelmed in a situation that feels threatening to our life or our fundamental sense of self – without ever coming back to safety and connection at the level of the nervous system. Life just goes on unresolved, and now there’s an aspect of being human that we really don’t know how to cope with. We section it off in our experience, call it "too much to handle", and try to avoid going there, or we have intense emotional charge around it in a way that doesn't fit the circumstances. Meanwhile, circumstances may have changed, and we now might have access to more empowerment and support than at the time of the original overwhelm.
Trauma healing, then, is the process of recognizing these parts of ourselves that are frozen in the past with the experience of "too much", for what they are. It's consciously sorting for what was a threat in the past, versus what is or is not a threat in the present. It's deliberately training the body to find safety in the present, and learning to feel physically safe(r) in the absence of immediate threat. It's gradually tapping into the physical survival energy that got stuck in the trauma and releasing it little by little, in a manageable way. It's rewriting a better ending to the story through direct felt experience. The new, experientially felt ending to the story is that you notice you survived whatever bad thing that originally was, you have felt some unfelt feelings and now you become better able to cope with what once overwhelmed you, you're able to protect yourself and find connection in the present. Then you can reflect on past circumstances in a coherent and fully emotionally engaged way, but without overwhelm.
Traumatic experiences are a normal part of life. They do make us worse for the wear of being alive on Earth. We can become very sensitive because of trauma and spend a lot of energy and stress trying to live in strict avoidance of trauma triggers. But it can also lead us to grow and become wiser and resilient in new and interesting ways that we would never have considered without it.
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I think of shame as a negative attitude towards self, ranging from a healthy "I'm ashamed that I didn't act in alignment with my values", to the more harmful ever-present background hum of some version of "I am a bad person", to the even deeper shame of not having a sense of self in relationship, and other patterns that play out outside of awareness.
Shame, by its nature, wants to hide. If we get to the point of being overloaded by shame, it shuts us down and drains our aliveness, our ability to feel. It's a big step to even own it and say "I feel ashamed."
When people carry these more damaging types of shame, I know that it's not because they are actually bad people. It's because they've experienced relational trauma and this is a symptom. In the shame place, there is badness: either I'm bad or someone else is bad or certain experiences that trigger shame are bad. It seems like reality, but it's just a symptom of the trauma that the person carries.
Sometimes shame has to be worked with indirectly because it so much wants to hide. If a person can own it, we talk about it as a normal part of human experience and recognize the purpose it's trying to serve. Nobody chooses to have lots of shame unless at some point in their development it was their only choice. When it becomes observable like this, we curiously, slowly, mindfully, and compassionately explore what is actually happening there, what parts might be present, what their roles are, get to know them and know their stories, we study the body-based expressions of shame and gradually explore new options and new meanings. We work on shifting your identity - from being the person who is bad, to being the person who can see, understand and have compassion for some part that thinks you're bad and has learned to hide in self-defense. Shame gradually becomes something that can be safely related to rather than being all-consuming.
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My main modality is Emotionally Focused Therapy. I draw on a range of mindful, somatic, attachment-based, and trauma-informed modalities that I've studied - as well as on my lived experience. The foundations of my philosophy are: Polyvagal Theory + Attachment Theory + Parts Work + Mindfulness + Process Work + Memory Reconsolidation + Existentialism. For more details on my formal background, see the About page.