For years, I’ve been helping people feel better about themselves as they go through life transitions, getting older, changing partners, dealing with job stress, begin new careers, dealing with difficult family members, raising challenging children, sleep problems and illness, and finding how to make their way in the world.
I work to find your strengths and give you tools to help yourself and use your own strength to help you, even if you don’t know you have it. I stand by your side as you make these difficult decisions and changes. No one said it would be easy or quick and it isn’t. That’s why an experienced guide is so important. We begin with you and end with a better version of you. We all come to a place in life where we are overwhelmed or stuck in a spot we feel we cant get out of. Getting help allows us to move on and become productive in our lives again.
I think I’m finally getting good at it after all these years. My clients have taught me a lot.
In my early work, I was a social worker at a psychiatric clinic, helping married couples and families with teenage children. Then an opportunity came along to become a psychologist and study how individuals learn, and don’t learn, and how to use research to know which ways of helping really work. Memory, cognition, attention and the brain were important parts of this study.
The world turned when we learned that we’d been wrong about the brain, and that it continued to grow and change into adulthood if we just learned how to use it. This was not only the Age of Aquarius but the “Third Age”, in which we learned to re-do life as we move into middle age and transition into adulthood, what many referred to as “re-packing your bags” and re-doing your “place at the fire”.
What I’m specially trained in is sleep problems – insomnia, jet lag and circadian rhythm disorders. I spent months studying with experts at the Duke University Sleep Medicine Clinic cutting edge ways to identify and fix your sleep problems, which affect a host of other issues like depression, anxiety, weight gain and numerous other physical illnesses. Hot off the press this month is research that points to good sleep as the number one way to prevent Alzheimers. Can you believe it? I can. I’ve seen what good sleep can do for people who hadn’t had it.
In the last six years, another way of helping came into my life through a colleague and friend. As a helping person, this was and still is the best thing since sliced bread!! This newer, more scientifically-based way of helping people treats the brain directly and without the side effects of medicines and is long-lasting. It’s called neurofeedback. Based on brain maps and your EEG and with the ease of watching a movie, your brain waves can gradually be trained to change depression, anxiety, sleep problems, brain injuries, and to enhance your well-being. It is especially effective with ADHD and attention problems, both in adults and children. Many hours of training and years of doing this have not dampened my enthusiasm for helping through the brain.
HAVE YOU HEARD THE GOOD NEWS ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH AND PSYCHOTHERAPY? IT'S NO LONGER "ONE SIZE FITS ALL" (TALK THERAPY). WE TAILOR WHAT WE DO TO YOUR INDIVIDUAL NEEDS, CHOOSING FROM A MENU OF OPTIONS.
Our science has advanced a quantum leap since we discovered and refined how to harness the power of the brain to help you. Through the prism of the brain, we now understand how to help you:
- calm your anxiety
- balance your mood
- fall asleep and stay asleep
- manage and reduce everyday stress
- maintain peace with your emotions
- better manage pain and physical injury
- all fostering a stronger, more versatile sense of self
Within the space and comfort of the psychotherapy relationship, all these and more are possible now with the use of newer techniques. Personal one to one therapy is still the core of a healing relationship, but in addition, we offer these newer evidence-based techniques which have shown great promise in healing at a deeper level:
- NEUROFEEDBACK
- VIELIGHT
- HEART RATE VARIABILITY
- TOUCHPOINTS
- EMDR