As a licensed marriage and family therapist I have enjoyed a private practice in the Lakewood/Long Beach area for over 20 years.  Early in my career I became interested in the mind/body connection.  Time and time again, while sitting with a client, I could hear the voice become constricted as if the throat was closing; a sad event would be told with no emotions expressed; or the energy in the room would go flat.  I thought this meant something significant but I didn’t know what to do with the information.  We didn’t talk about the relationship between psychotherapy and the body when I was in graduate school.

I wanted to know how thoughts and the pain from traumas and stuck emotions were held in the body and how this holding influences beliefs, behavior, health and energy.  I wanted quick, noninvasive and effective treatments because talking sometimes re-traumatizes clients.  I knew there had to be other approaches and my goal became to find them and get training.

Integrative Body Psychotherapy (IBP) was the bridge that took me from talk therapy to holistic therapy.  After I finished my training, I taught IBP for two years.  A whole new world opened up to me because I could now track the body’s energy, seeing and understanding on deeper and subtler levels how the mind and body connect. 

Everything changed on April 18, 1997.  Life had been going really well; my husband and I were leaving two days later for our trip of a lifetime to Italy and I was only 2 months away from completing the three-year training program at IBP.  My personal life literally took a life-changing turn.  My husband and I were hit by a car while making a “right” turn.  I was hurt.  In what seemed like a blink of an eye I was no longer just a therapist wanting to help my clients, I was a human being who needed help recovering from a trauma and I was physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually in trouble.  I was constantly in excruciating pain, my office telephone was not ringing, I could only see a few clients a week and I was afraid of losing my practice, yet knew I wasn’t capable of working more than I was at that time, and angrily sitting with the question of “why me, why now?” 

Traditional medicine was not helping me; living with the pain was not an option I could entertain. I wasn’t willing to passively accept my state of health at that time so the remaining option was to start looking at alternative approaches. As life would eventually show me, recovering from my injuries provided the opportunity to become a mind/body expert and influences how I practice psychotherapy today.

I used various mind/body interventions to recover because I found one approach didn’t help with every symptom.  Using a holistic rather than traditional approach I learned:

• Physically:
  • to listen to my body, manage the pain, and clear the trauma
• Mentally:
  • to identify and clear self-sabotaging beliefs about my ability to be successful again
• Emotionally:
  • to clear all the emotions around the trauma
• Spiritually:
  • to connect with my intuition and trust my deeper wisdom

It took a year and a half before I could again focus on my practice.  In the past fifteen years I have traveled across the country to get trained in various mind/body psychotherapy approaches.  For lasting change to occur, I believe healing must integrate at all levels: the mind, the body and the spirit.  One of the holistic practitioners that I had seen while on my own journey of healing told me all those years ago that I would eventually thank the driver of that other car involved in my accident. Much to my surprise, I now realize how grateful I am because that experience led me to energy psychotherapy and a different approach to healing.

I have found cutting edge energy psychology (EP) techniques such as Advanced Integrative Therapy (AIT), Healing From the Body Level Up (HBLU) and Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) to provide the symptom relief I was looking for.  Visit my Services page for more information on any or all of these approaches.

Most clients benefit in some way from the techniques and tools I have acquired.  Energetically, things change when we learn to take a few belly breaths to stop the hair trigger fight-flight-freeze response, to balance the brain to get control of emotional overreaction, or to ground to connect the mind and body.  Not only do these energy based techniques provide symptom relief while avoiding the re-traumatizing potential of other therapies, they can also enhance well-being, reduce stress, regulate emotions, and more. 

I have found energy psychology to be profound and life-changing, not only for my clients but in my personal life as well.  I am passionate about working with people who want a greater level of mind/body connection, who are interested in connecting to their deeper wisdom and who are willing to go those extra miles to heal.  I work with clients who experience anxiety, depression, phobias, trauma related symptoms, chronic pain and relationship issues.  I have developed the Cutting Edge Tools for Managing Stress Workshop along with my colleague, Eileen Klein.  Our latest creation is a workshop called Rewriting Your Story.  Click on the workshop you are interested in for the description.