Sometimes we need extra, non-traditional help getting our mental health to start to shift in the right direction. I can coach you through one alternative approach: biohacking.

Integrating spirituality into the counseling process can create this kind of healing movement. We invite you to bring your faith, doubts, emotions and the wisdom of your body into our work together.

We all look for ways to manage overwhelming life circumstances, feelings or relationships and you may have turned to disordered eating. My work with you is not about blaming anyone or making you feel guilty.

Like a foreign object in the body can cause infection, emotional trauma can fester inside the body and soul, causing painful psychological and physical symptoms. I utilize a powerful tool for addressing and resolving deep emotional wounds: EMDR.

This is a sample exercise that I may do with a client around anxiety. It incorporates EMDR and Internal Family Systems to help you identify and work with the family system that exists within your own mind.

Journaling is like a mental workout. We all know that exercise is good for our body and ideally is done on a daily basis. The same is true for our minds. Taking a little bit of time to step back and do some reflection can really open things up and be a game changer.

In EMDR, we practice the presence of being. We practice the art of noticing. This presence is a powerful force. This is not just wishful thinking or nice thoughts.

Are we remembering them in the present or reliving them in the past? Remembering creates healing and movement, reliving perpetuates rumination and stagnation.

When was the last time you were completely in tune with your body? It is magical. Your thoughts and feelings don’t stick around, they only made passing appearances as your whole being is engrossed in the present moment.

I love facilitating a space for men to share what’s going on with them. A space where we talk about real stuff. When was the last time you talked about real stuff that’s going on with you?

Trying to change everything that's wrong with the world and those around us can be quite the setup for feeling powerless and cynical. It’s the easier route to project and blame my current state on the people around me, the president, my team losing, the weather…

Our understanding of who we are in relationship to the world and other people develops out of the attachment we have to our parent(s) or primary caregiver(s) as children. Parents are often doing the best they can and that can still not be enough sometimes.

I wanted to share some common symptoms and problems that are often (not always of course) present with males who come into my office:

• They have problems with anxiety and stress, and they internalize and absorb this stress

• They can’t get out of their head / their mind spins in circles

• They are more often than not analyzing / thinking / evaluating future tasks or past problems

• They have become increasingly more angry and irritable and notice that they snap at small, trivial things more than they used to

When you are either giving or receiving support from a loved one, you feel the pressure to say the right thing. I hear this all the time, and I feel for you. I too have questioned what I should or shouldn't say to a loved one. The more intimate the relationship, the more pressure you feel. It can feel defeating, helpless, hopeless and paralyzing.

One major difference between EMDR and traditional talk therapy: learning to observe and notice your experience instead of trying to think our way to a solution. Below I hope to explain how this works and why it works.

Our natural tendency is to try to think harder and harder to solve what ails us. Our mind may tell us, “If I can just understand why that happened to me, I will feel better.”  While this makes perfect sense, the problem is that just knowing why something happened to us often doesn’t resolve our symptoms of trauma.

If you've ever experienced something overwhelming, you've had to cope somehow. Coping is something you do to be able to deal with your internal world (feelings, thoughts, memories) as it reacts to an outside stressor. Simply put, it's a way of comforting yourself.

In reality, you are coping with various stressors every day—a driver cutting you off, a pop quiz in math class, getting stuck in a long grocery line. But sometimes, you have an internal reaction to something that pushes you beyond your normal capacity to cope. When this happens, it's like poking a hole in a small boat.

There is so much pressure on you, as a parent, to be perfect. You've seen the judgmental look of a passerby as you wrangle your child into the car. You know the guilt that comes after reacting in anger to your child's innocent (but annoying) plea for attention. 

As a child, you tell yourself the story that preserves your sense of safety: my parents are good and have it all under control. Safety is a primitive, inherent need you have and your growth as a child depends on it. You're completely dependent on your parents and if they weren't good enough and couldn't provide this sense of safety, the fear would capsize your child self and stunt your emotional and interpersonal development.