AEDP INDIVIDUAL THERAPY IN FOLSOM
• Are you struggling with anxiety, depression, or chronic stress?
• Is it hard for you to talk about your feelings or needs?
• Do you have trouble finding or maintaining close relationships?
• Are you still suffering from an abusive or dysfunctional upbringing?
People seek counseling for many reasons. You may need support managing anxiety and stress, overcoming depression, building healthier relationships, learning to talk about your feelings and needs, or healing from a painful personal history. Whatever your goals are, I can help.
I believe in the value and necessity of self-exploration, and in over a decade of clinical practice, I've seen how individual counseling can lead to deep healing and lasting changes in our relationships with our selves and with others. I love the process of getting to know each of my clients and learning how to give each of them the support and feedback they need to heal and grow, and I feel privileged to be with them on their journeys of personal growth. Please know, too, that I am an LGBT-friendly therapist and that I appreciate exploring how broader cultural issues — such as racism and sexism — affect our well-being as individuals.
If you're interested in starting individual therapy, some of the things I can help you with are…
• Managing stress, anxiety, and conflict
• Letting go of depression, self-criticism, and low self-esteem
• Developing happy, close, meaningful relationships
• Building better communication and assertiveness skills
• Healing from trauma, abuse, or dysfunctional family experiences
• Exploring who you are and what you want from life
If you're looking for individual therapy in Folsom, or wondering if counseling could be right for you, please call or text me at 916.276.7709 for a free phone consultation. Let's work together to help you meet your goals.
WHAT IS ACCELERATED EXPERIENTIAL DYNAMIC PSYCHOTHERAPY (AEDP)?
“There is no better way to capture the ethos of AEDP than to say this: we try to help our patients and ourselves become stronger at the broken places. By working with trauma, loss, and painful consequences, we discover places that have always been strong, places that were never broken." — Dr. Diana Fosha, Founder of AEDP
Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) asserts that all of us are born with an innate drive to grow and heal, to "self-right." For that process to fully engage, we first need a safe place to connect. In AEDP, we recognize that all of us carry hurts from our past, but that we have the capacity to heal and actually grow from those hurts — to become "stronger at the broken places" — when we do it in connection with a truly safe, caring, and responsive person. In AEDP, the therapist works to create that environment for their client and, together, therapist and client can explore places that were too difficult to traverse alone.
AEDP is an emotion-focused, body-focused, experiential therapy. This means that, instead of doing cognitive work where we're challenging your false beliefs about your self or the world around you, we focus on your emotional and physical experience in the here-and-now. Staying in the present and staying with emotional processes vs. intellectually analyzing your experiences not only allows for us to move quickly (hence the word "Accelerated"), but the emotional and relational nature of the therapy allows for your brain to rewrite things that were first laid down emotionally and relationally. For example, you didn't learn intellectually to be afraid of your sadness because your father might get angry or distant, you learned it through an upsetting emotional experience with him that encoded it in your brain as something dangerous. To truly "undo" and overwrite that learning, you need to have what psychologists call a "corrective emotional experience," done in relationship with a caring other. To quote Joelle Brandt, "Childhood trauma is relational…you can't heal relational trauma by yourself. It has to be healed in relation."