Recovering from adversity is a process which requires an attuned, individualized approach.
Learn more about my style of relational therapy to see if it could be helpful for you
I guide my clients to safely process the effects of what they’ve been through.
I work with an awareness that the people who come to see me often endured something stressful or traumatic in the context of a relationship. Experiences like this can disrupt the way we relate to ourselves and to the world. Trusting others can be understandably difficult. Relational therapy is about co-creating a professional, working relationship that offers emotional safety, non-judgement, and unconditional compassion. This becomes the foundation upon which we can begin to explore our inner world with curiosity. From this place of curiosity, new ways of being in relationship with ourselves can start to emerge.
Who can benefit from relational therapy?
You do not need to have a formal diagnosis of a trauma-, anxiety-, or stress-related disorder to work with me. You also do not need to have certainty about whether your experiences were indeed traumatic. If you went through something (or are going through something) that is an enduring source of distress or discomfort, then relational therapy may be a good fit for you.
I specialize in helping people identify patterns that adaptively emerged from adversity, and supporting them as they step away from what feels known and familiar, toward what is preferred and authentic.
Some of the patterns that we can work with in relational therapy:
Shame, feeling unworthy, unlovable, or inherently bad
Inner critic, feeling ‘never good enough’
Anxiety, feeling vigilant or filled with dread
Isolation, feeling invalidated, unseen, misunderstood, lonely
Self-hatred, feelings of wanting to reject or disregard who you are
Unease, feeling as though you can’t slow down or relax
Dissociation, feeling numb or disconnected
Grief, feeling a deep, enduring sense of loss
Panic, feeling physically ill or viscerally distraught from anxiety
Disconnect, feeling out of touch with yourself, your body, or your life
Relationship problems, feeling difficulty connecting or setting boundaries
Pressure, feeling like you have to be somewhere other than where you are right now
These patterns emerge to help us endure… to help us survive. They’re involuntary, and undeserving of blame or judgement. They were adaptively constructed around adversity, and just as they were constructed, so too can they be deconstructed.
It is possible to recover from the enduring emotional impacts of stress, trauma, and adversity. Relational therapy is one evidence-based way to support the brain’s innate capacity for healing.
I have dedicated my career to understanding and treating the impacts of adversity, pursuing specialized training beyond my MA in counselling psychology to learn the nuances of working with people who have endured adversity, stress, or trauma.
I am trained in Narrative Therapy, Internal Family Systems (IFS), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), the Neuro-Affective Relational Model (NARM), and Trauma-Focused Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (TF-ACT), all of which inform my work. I also incorporate current trauma theory, attachment theory, and an understanding of the neurobiology of trauma.
The following practices and principles are key parts of my approach to helping people recover from trauma:
-
When some of our important relationships have felt damaging, conflicting, scary, or unpredictable, the therapeutic relationship aims to offer the opposite. It is the anchored, safe place from which we can establish or deepen our connection with ourselves. I approach each client with a genuine sense of curiosity, compassion, and possibility—with time, my hope is for my clients to see themselves the way I see them—deeply human, valued, and worthy of ease and comfort.
-
Therapy is a space for practicing inner exploration with more openness and curiosity. When we build a more open and curious relationship with ourselves, we can begin to assign new meanings to the experiences that we once met with self-blame, harsh criticism, or shame (all adaptive responses in the context of trauma). We can use our growing, curious awareness to support ourselves as we begin moving away from old patterns and toward our preferred ways of treating ourselves.
-
When therapy feels safe enough (and safety takes time to build), painful emotions and memories can be processed. In my approach, to “process” does not mean retelling traumatic stories in depth or reliving specific details of traumatic memories. It is about processing the ways in which the memories show up in the here-and-now. Memories of adversity or trauma stay with us in multiple levels of our being: emotional, somatic (physical), cognitive (thinking, beliefs), and within our very identity. Recovery involves gently turning toward these memories in their here-and-now form, at a pace that feels tolerable, to make sense of them, contain the emotion that emerges from them, and eventually allow them to exist alongside our present-day experiences.
When appropriate, I use EMDR to facilitate reprocessing. EMDR is a modality which helps the brain process traumatic experiences so that they no longer have the same effect on us. It is a well established and highly researched therapy, and is included in the APA and WHO guidelines for trauma treatment.
-
Adversity, stress, and trauma do not happen in isolation from the world around us. Making sense of our personal stories often involves zooming out to acknowledge the intergenerational, societal, and/or familial factors that have played a role in shaping our experiences.
Many of my clients are LGBTQ+ folks, neurodivergent folks, and/or ethnic minorities who want to process the impact of marginalization.
As a white Western therapist in a multicultural Asian city, my approach is to be affirming of cultural identity. This means that my clients’ hopes, desires, and intentions are more important to me than Western views of individual identity, family relationships, and community. -
I believe that a core process of therapy is establishing how you want to be in relationship with yourself. When adverse or challenging life experiences have disrupted or interrupted your right to develop a solid sense of who you are, it can be difficult to think about what you most want in life. Relational therapy provides space to get more closely acquainted with your identity and your hopes, and space to explore and process what might be getting in the way of you living as authentically and fully as you’d like.
Each of my clients has their own set of practices, beliefs, values, worldviews, strengths, and/or resources that naturally become incorporated into our process. There are many, many practices that can support recovery in addition to the therapeutic approaches that I am trained to use.
If you’d like to see if we’re a good fit,