The work beneath the work.
My approach to integrative, body-based therapy
Many of us were drawn to self-discovery hoping that if we could just understand ourselves well enough, we'd finally feel okay.
We can name our patterns, triggers, attachment styles, and the family systems we grew up inside of. Although this feels like progress, it doesn’t feel like change. We can understand ourselves intellectually, but still feel like something is missing.
That something is almost always the body.
This work isn't about fixing yourself. It's about meeting yourself.
Real change doesn’t happen by overriding any part of who you are. It only happens by turning towards those parts slowly and honestly, inside a relationship that can hold the weight of what you find there.
That's where we begin.
The Method
Most therapy is what's called top-down work, it engages the thinking mind. You talk about what's happening. You name your patterns. You build insight, work with thoughts and beliefs.
It's valuable. For a lot of people, it's where real change begins.
But it's only half the picture.
Beneath your thinking mind is your body. Your nervous system. Your breath. Your felt sense of what's safe and what isn't. That part of you doesn't speak with words. It speaks in tension, in fatigue, in the things your mind hasn't found language for yet.
Bottom-up work begins there. With the body. With the nervous system. With what's happening underneath the story you've been telling about yourself.
The work I do is both. Together.
In session, that might look like talking through something that's been weighing on you and pausing to notice what your body is doing while you talk about it. It might look like tracking a sensation instead of analyzing a thought. It might look like learning to recognize, in real time, when your nervous system has moved out of regulation, and what helps it return.
Therapy with me isn't about becoming someone new.
There's a distinction I keep coming back to in my own life, and in the work I do with clients.
Choosing yourself isn't the same as connecting with yourself.
Choosing yourself looks like setting the boundary. Leaving the job. Ending the relationship. Saying no. Those things matter, and they take courage.
But there's a deeper layer underneath, one most of us were never taught how to access.
It's not the choosing. It's the turning toward. Actually meeting the self you've been choosing for. And staying there.
That's the work. Not the boundary, but the relationship with the one who's setting it. Not the decision, but the body that has to live inside of it.
What we're building in therapy together is an internal experience of I see you, and you are loved here too. Not from anyone outside of you. From within.
That's the ground real change grows from. Everything else — the better boundaries, the steadier relationships, the life that finally feels like yours — comes from there.
The modalities I work with:
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Learning to make room for the hard stuff (the anxiety, the self-doubt, the grief) without letting it run the show. Less fighting your inner experience. More moving toward what actually matters to you.
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Noticing the thought patterns that have been quietly steering you, and learning how to work with them instead of being run by them. Practical, structured, and useful, especially when your mind feels like it's on a loop.
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Looking at what's already working, even in small ways, and building from there. Helpful when you feel stuck in what's wrong and need to remember what's still right.
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Building a kinder, steadier relationship with yourself. Especially the parts you've been hardest on. This is where a lot of the real shift happens for high-achieving women, learning to be on your own side.
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Slowing down enough to actually feel what's underneath. So often the surface emotion (irritation, numbness, anxiety) is protecting something tender beneath it. EFT helps you meet that.
We also build body-based awareness in real time, in session, so you can start to feel the shifts instead of just understanding them.
The modalities explored above are top-down, using the mind to understand the mind. It's often where therapy starts. But for many of the people I work with, it's not where the real shift occurs.
You can understand your patterns completely and still notice them running the show.
You can know exactly why you're anxious and still wake up at 4am with your chest tight.
You can name the boundary you need to set and still feel sick the moment you try.
That's not a thinking problem. That's a nervous system that hasn't caught up yet.
So alongside the talk-based work, we get to know your nervous system, what activates it, what settles it, and what it's been carrying. This is the integration piece. The bridge between what you know in your mind and what you feel in your body.
It's also what most of my clients tell me was missing from the work they'd done before.
