Holistic Therapy for Women in Maine & California

I view this as a foundational element of the work I do as a therapist. Listening carefully. Striving to understand your experiences and concerns without judgment. And creating a safe, accepting environment where you can be honest and learn more about yourself.

We’ll go at your pace, focusing on what feels most important to you. Rather than telling you what to do, I’ll support you in connecting with your own insight and direction.

A self-compassionate approach is about learning to treat yourself with the same kindness, understanding, and support you would offer to someone you care about—especially when you’re struggling, make a mistake, or feel inadequate.

Self-compassion is not about making excuses, avoiding responsibility, or pretending everything is fine. It means supporting yourself enough to face difficulties, learn from them, and make changes without attacking yourself.

The three main parts to Self-Compassion include: mindfulness (recognizing and making space to notice the challenges at hand), self-kindness (responding with warmth and acceptance versus self-criticism), and common humanity (remembering that mistakes, imperfection and suffering are something we all experience at times).

If the idea of having to focus on a painful or overwhelming memory in therapy sounds intimidating to you, you’re not alone. While some therapeutic modalities require you to talk about difficult or traumatic experiences in detail, the Flash Technique is a different, yet beneficial, approach.

With Flash, we’ll discuss your memories or concerns just enough to identify a target, then shift to a Positive Engagement Focus (an enjoyable, calming topic) which allows your brain to process the harder stuff in the background. It is a gentle way to dial down the emotional distress of a memory without triggering a panic response or making you feel overwhelmed.

The Rest and Restore Protocol™ (aka RRP) is a gentle, effective way to teach your nervous system how to step out of a stress response and return to a state of balance and deep rest. Developed by Dr. Stephen Porges and Unyte Health, this Polyvagal-informed protocol uses 10, 30-minute tracks of specially engineered music to communicate directly with your autonomic nervous system, increasing calm, balance and restoration.

RRP can be beneficial for symptoms of anxiety and depression, as well as somatic responses to stress, such as digestive or GI concerns, a racing heart, muscle tension, and insomnia.

We’ll begin the listening process together and practice reflecting on and adjusting your listening length and frequency. When you feel ready, you can continue listening in between sessions on your own time. If you prefer to complete all of your listening during your therapy sessions, that’s o-kay, too!

Resource tapping helps your mind and body connect with an increased sense of safety or support by visualizing a comforting person, place, image, or feeling while gently tapping on your knees or shoulders. (The tapping is a form of bilateral stimulation and deepens the experience.)

The purpose isn’t to force yourself to relax or to make difficult feelings disappear. Resource tapping helps your nervous system to practice recognizing support and building an internal sense of safety, which can be particularly beneficial when you’re processing scary or traumatic experiences.

In Brainspotting, developed by David Grand, PhD, there is a saying, “Where you look affects how you feel.”

When you experience something stressful, your brain can't always process it all. So those memories and associated somatic experiences can get stuck or stored internally. Brainspotting is an approach that utilizes focused mindfulness, and eye positions connected to those feelings or memories, to create a direct pathway that helps to open up and release the stuck energy. In addition to being beneficial for stressors and experiences of many kinds, Brainspotting can also be used to deepen more positive, grounded and expansive states.