“Our personal demons come in many guises. We experience them as shame, as jealousy, as abandonment, as rage. They are anything that makes us so uncomfortable that we continually run away. We do the big escape: we act out, say something, slam a door, hit someone, or throw a pot as a way of not facing what’s happening in our hearts. Or we shove the feelings under and somehow deaden the pain. We can spend our whole lives escaping from the monsters of our minds. All over the world, people are so caught in running that they forget to take advantage of the beauty around them. We become so accustomed to speeding ahead that we rob ourselves of joy.” ”
As Pema Chodron notes above, many of us struggle with defenses and behaviors we have developed in order to escape the pain of our lives, whether it be in the form of substances, food, sex/relationships, work, perfectionism, dissociation, or something else, and in our understandable attempts to avoid this pain we become disconnected from our authentic self and body in the process.
As a result, we can often wind up creating even more suffering for ourselves and begin to not only numb the pain, but the joys as well. My work focuses on helping clients recover the true self through healing past traumas, reconnecting to the body, and addressing current symptoms and/or medicating behaviors; through doing this, we can learn to live from a place of authenticity and begin to experience life more fully, both the pains and the joys.
I have a respect for and personal understanding of the healing process. With experience working with a wide range of mental health, addiction, and personality issues and specialization in trauma resolution and recovery, I take an integrated and personalized approach to treatment in order to fit the needs of each unique individual. I always pull from a holistic approach that incorporates mind/body/spirit components, which I believe to be integral to the healing process.