Focus of Care

Performance Anxiety and Workplace Stress

Leaning on Mindful-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) as well as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), performance pressures and anxiety are viewed as mechanical challenges to solve and progressively overcome. Rumination, lack of workplace boundaries impacting other key areas of life, escalating fear, and competing needs can drain our battery without giving time to recharge. Like open tabs on a computer stealing energy in the background, our minds too are subject to burdens imposed by overwhelm and compound stress. I approach the mind as a system, deploying simple, approachable strategies and tools to help re-train overactive minds and focus energy toward generative processes aligned with your real workflows. This helps trim the fat of worry that isn’t required to execute tasks and competently take action. Emotional regulation, compartmentalization, adaptive lenses, and attentional awareness will guide most of our work in this domain.

Relational Repair and Reevaluation

Taking cues from the Gottman Method and ACT, relationships are viewed as an ongoing negotiation and evolving landscape. Many clients have described challenges in their relationships marked by unworkable patterns that lead to misunderstanding, skepticism, frustration, gridlock, and even resentment. I approach relationships through a framework of functionalism. We’ll work together to dissect present patterns of communication, interaction, and strategies you and your partner have independently deployed to survive and cohabitate up to the present moment. From there, we’ll examine your vision of partnership, unpack ways to compassionately encourage your partner to express their own vision of change, and finally explore means of cooperatively moving in a shared direction that appreciates both parties’ needs and wants. To do this we’ll examine means of empathizing with the weight of your future self. Each step, every action, and each word summons a reaction from your partner. Together we’ll uncover means of building and stabilizing trust, warmth, mutuality, and intimacy.

Life Transitions

Life seems to throw more wrenches than dodgeballs. Parenthood, career changes, promotions, breakups, starting or selling one’s company, loss, divorce, caring for aging parents, illness, injury, and even death can shake us and generate waves of anxiety and dread. I approach life transitions top-down and bottom-up dialectically. From a top-down approach I employ existentialist and logotherapy-based frameworks to distill the meaning contained in the moment beyond just emotional distress. We’ll consider what you value, the limits of your agency, and longer-term wants which can help contextualize transitions and structure decisions based on your ultimate good. From the bottom-up we’ll integrate skills for emotional regulation, distress tolerance, grounding, active mindfulness, and de-fusion to help improve resilience and decrease emotional intensity.

Chronic Depression, Malaise, Long-term Restlesslessness

Within this arena we’ll target narratives, values, and scope of present agency. What stories play over and over within your mind? When do you feel stuck and when do you feel able to move forward? Who or what seems to be in the way of what you want? Precisely what are you looking for and what series of actions might be taken to move steadily closer to your desired life? When do you feel animated and more alive? When does dread create internal paralysis? What do you find yourself reaching for right now? What do you find yourself avoiding or distracting from? As a team we’ll push toward reshaping a sense-of-self that feels more adaptable and psychologically flexible, define tangible solutions, and increase feelings of ease and comfort.

Neurodivergence (ADHD and Autism)

Over the last decade Autism and ADHD have been at the center of my work. Within the scope of my care I have found that neuroscience, social mapping, and tailored behavioral models have had the most traction in assisting clients with neurodivergence. As we sit down together, we’ll make sense of how you cognitively and emotionally see the world, how your mind organizes information, what changes to routine can better serve the pacing of your day, and how to communicate needs with partners/family to negotiate their expectations versus the reality of your experiences.

Bipolar Disorder II

At the heart of Bipolar Disorder are challenges related to identity, impulse control, underlying motivation, meta-cognition and empathy for inevitable changes brought on by the future. Hypomanic episodes feel electric, where the world pops with color, texture, and an excitement that is very difficult to match under more regulated or depressive conditions. The issue is that the magic never lasts, and the clock strikes midnight eventually. Like clockwork, hypomanic episodes tend to be followed by longer depressive episodes that drain motivation and suck the interest out of daily life. On the path out of rapid cycling and sharp juxtaposed realities is identifying with a regulated balancing point. To do this we’ll explore meta-cognition as we examine early triggers for depressive or hypomanic shifts. Learning how to mindfully select upregulating and downregulating activities and skills will help stabilize and anchor emotional urges. Our goal will be to build a new awareness of what happens next when depressive or hypomanic narratives take root. Over time, like learning how to drive stick or ride a horse, we'll uncover more adaptive processes that put you back in control before the engine stalls or you find you’re bucked from the saddle.

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