Do I take insurance?

No, but I do offer a limited number of sliding scale spots from $50-240 depending on your financial situation.

I also offer superbills when you pay the standard out of pocket rate (160) which you can submit to your insurance company and be reimbursed for the total minus your copay. Reimbursement varies based on your insurance plan.

Please note I cannot offer both sliding scale and superbills. Please reach out if you have any questions about this policy.

What is somatic therapy?

Somatic therapy acknowledges in its most basic assumptions that what we feel is more than what we can rationally express or understand, and that by reducing it to an intellectual idea or a story or a rational description, critically important truths are lost in translation.

Somatic trauma therapy operates on the principle that trauma results in stuck emotional and physiological patterns in the body, and that by moving our body beyond the limits of those patterns, it can start to realize, oh, hey! I’m not in danger right now, there is safety available in this present moment, this moment is more than a projection of the past!

Another way that Somatic therapy is great for trauma is that traumatic memories are often ineffable, indescribable, too big for words: the stories that we experience are so far beyond what our language can describe that often it feels like it can be useless to talk about!

By focusing on sensation, movement, and emotional awareness, rather than intellectually understanding or explaining what we’re going through, we can move past the barrier of rationality into the richness of the true animal body experience of living with trauma, and teach that animal body that it is safe in a way that it can actually understand.

What is Trauma?

Trauma according to the ICD’s clinical angle is defined as: experiencing or witnessing an exceptionally threatening or catastrophic stressful event (war, natural disasters, life threatening accidents, etc)

However, I believe that excludes a lot of people whose bodies, emotions and minds are reacting in an almost identical way to people who have experienced these more “official” traumas.

In my practice, I define a trauma as any experience that

1. Was perceived as life threatening, terrifying, or otherwise extremely distressing.

2. Overwhelmed your capacity to cope.

3. Had an element of being unable to escape or access adequate support or aid in the moment

4. Does not “fit in” with the rest of your experiences, and destroys your previous paradigms for understanding what is or is not possible in this world, and therefore poses an existential challenge to the person experiencing it.

An interesting fact about trauma is that unlike many mental health conditions that exist, the symptomology of trauma (hyper vigilance, flashbacks, somatic symptoms, nightmares, irritability, loss of meaning, depression, etc) are remarkably consistent across different cultures throughout the world. That means that instead of being heavily culture-dependent, trauma symptoms emerge from deeper in the brain, deep in our bodies, below our learned behaviors and our culture. We all have the same kind of brain, and we all react with a pretty specific range of responses to trauma as human beings.

What does it mean that I’m a “Neurodivergence Affirming Therapist”?

To me, being a neurodivergence affirming therapist ties in with being an anticapitalist therapist and an anti-oppression therapist. “Divergence” implies the existence of a non-divergent, or in other words, a “normal” neurotype, when in reality, all of these neurotypes have existed since the beginning of time! Why is it now that we’ve decided certain people are “typical” and others are “divergent”? Well, if you look at what those words point out, generally neurotypical just tends to refer to people who don’t struggle with the completely unrealistic demands of capitalism quite so pointedly. How interesting that struggling with it is pathologized… I don’t buy it.

We do live in this world though, and as much as I’d like to just tell your boss to fuck off, I know you need a job to live, so our work together is familiarizing ourselves with your strengths, your limitations, your interests, and your boundaries, and working together to shift your life in the direction of honoring your limits, structuring and finding support with necessary tasks in a way that makes them easier to complete, and rejecting unnecessary, harmful or unrealistic burdens as well as the internalized shame of failing at capitalism because, you know, it’s no great accomplishment to succeed at selling your soul at the expense of your health.

How can we feel self-compassion, pride, and even inspiration, in living and being creative and generative in a way that honors YOU and your needs? How can we start throwing off the judgments placed on you by oppressive and exploitative forces? How can we critically and begrudgingly accept the things that we must about world we live in and allow you to sustain yourself within capitalism, instead of just adhering to some external standard of productivity that’s slowly (or quickly) killing your soul??? How can we blend acceptance of what is with vision and activism and being uncrushable and indomitable? This is our work. It’s fun stuff. Love doing it.