What kind of therapy do you provide?
My style is practical, compassionate, and evidence based. The foundation of my work is my trust that you are the foremost expert on your own life. In turn, though growth can be painful, my number one priority is providing a truly trustworthy context where you can face that pain in a way that efficiently creates the changes you want most.
I’ll start by getting a detailed picture of your hopes, dreams, challenges, and current circumstances. Together, we’ll then customize a set of therapeutic strategies specifically for your unique brain and your existing habits and skills.
We can focus on building practical systems to manage your time, energy, and attention effectively. We will make space for whatever grief, pain, or distress you are experiencing, and practice moving through it if that is what you want–and we can level up your ability to continue showing up for yourself in the face of overwhelming emotions, like anxiety, shame, loneliness, or grief.
One week at a time, I’ll help you stay focused until you break through patterns of procrastination, overwhelm, and paralysis, gradually cultivating habits that support your most authentic self.
What modalities do you use?
Like all the clinicians at Divergent Path, my primary therapeutic modality is ACT—Acceptance and Committent Therapy. ACT has an excellent evidence base for a wide variety of situations. It centers around helping clients master six processes that constitute psychological flexibility. Another way of thinking about it would be that these six proceses cultivate resilience, or what a navy seal might call “mental toughness.”
The ACT framework dovetails beautifully with my previous work and life experience. A decade of mindfulness meditation and half a decade of executive function coaching—which is a more pragmatic and limited way of supporting people towards their goals—have given me a strong foundation to embark on my work as an ACT clinician.
For my fellow therapy nerds out there: I am also deeply influenced by:
-Motivational Interviewing (particularly in its emphasis on respect for clients and setting client-centered goals)
-Memory Reconsolidation (a framework for addressing trauma with a strong evidence base in neuroscience; it involves helping clients shift their neurology through strategically invoking “disconfirming experiences” during a specific neurologically activating sequence of emotions/re-experiencing)
-Attchment Theory
-Brene Brown’s body of work—some of her books having been hour-for hour more useful to me than the best therapy I’ve ever had
-Carol Dweck and Angela Duckworth’s work on the psychology of grit and resilience
-John Gottman’s technical and fascinating mathematizations of trust and betrayal
I have also gotten a lot out of vaso-vagal theory, and am generally a fan of the benefits of educating clients on their neurology; this can be cruicial to help de-stigmatize the need to actively regulate our nervous systems. That said, as with nearly everything on this list, I find some of the claims it makes are not supported by the evidence. That’s OK; we take what works for us.
Finally, I would be wrong not to acknowlege that my first and most significant training came from an indigenous (Maori) family member. Through countless formative hours attuning with my joys and sorrows, helping me strategize solutions, and tutoring me in mathematics, he taught me to bring a profoundly systemic perspective and a spirit of collaborative resistance to every part of life. He taught me that power and liberation are things we build in and through each other. I would not be who I am as a therapist, be who I am as a person, or indeed be here at all, without him—and the deepest perspective I bring to this work is in the lineage of his teaching.
