Better Now
Therapy
I don’t offer advice, tell you what to do, or generalize your experience.
Your unique, subjective experience and pain are honored, while also
holding an awareness of the shared nature of human suffering
Modalities Used:
1. What is Emotion Focused/
Psychodynamic Therapy?
Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) is an evidence-based approach to psychotherapy that focuses on experiencing, expressing, and understanding emotions in a therapeutic setting.
This involves recognizing and accepting your feelings without judgment, but with the spirit of allowing and self-compassion.
E-motions motivate thoughts, actions, and urges, hence the importance of processing emotions effectively.
EFT aims to help you understand the origins of your emotions, exploring how past experiences and relationships (like familial) may influence your current emotional responses. Looking into your past and your unmet needs makes this approach psychodynamic.
Built into EFT are specific exercises and practices that will help you experience your emotions in a safe, therapeutic setting. EFT is profoundly process-oriented rather than content-oriented
2. What is Somatic- /Mindfulness-/Nature-Based therapy?
This approach integrates mindfulness, somatic awareness, and nature-based practices to help individuals become more grounded in their physiological and emotional responses, including fight, flight, freeze, and fawn patterns, especially when these reactions feel overwhelming or automatic.
These nervous system responses may show up as intense sensations, impulses, or emotional states that can be difficult to tolerate, regulate, or understand in the moment.
Somatic therapy focuses on building awareness of the body, breath, and nervous system, supporting the processing of these experiences with intention, acceptance, and discernment. Mindfulness practices help develop present-moment awareness and reduce automatic reactivity. Nature-based approaches support grounding, regulation, and reconnection by drawing on the restorative effects of nature.
Together, we will build a “toolbox” of supportive resources that strengthen your nervous system’s capacity for self-regulation, which may also include the expressive arts, like visual, written, & musical.
3. What is Dream Work?
Dream work is a reflective and collaborative process that explores the emotions, symbols, metaphors, myths, and themes that appear in your dreams.
This approach is Jungian-informed, meaning it draws on structured ways of working with dreams influenced by Carl Jung, who traveled on “psychological expeditions,” to Africa, North America, and India to learn from different cultures, myths, and religious traditions. These experiences shaped his belief that dreams often use symbols and patterns that reflect shared human themes, which can be explored through attention to symbolism, emotional tone, and recurring images as a way of understanding inner experience.
Dream work invites curiosity, openness, and personal meaning-making, recognizing that dreams are deeply shaped by your lived experience, culture, identity, and relationships.
From a culturally responsive and decolonizing lens, this process also honors Indigenous perspectives, ancestral wisdom, intuition, storytelling, and other non-linear ways of knowing as valid and important pathways to insight and healing.
*Because Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) involves working directly with vulnerable emotional experience, it is often most supportive when a person has sufficient emotional stability and capacity to engage with those feelings safely. It may not be the most appropriate starting point when someone is currently experiencing significant emotional detachment, high avoidance, or acute dysregulation that includes self-harm, suicidal behavior, or harm toward others.
*For similar reasons, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Somatic Experiencing (SE) may be more challenging for individuals experiencing severe impulsivity, acute depression, or intense panic, as increased awareness of thoughts, bodily sensations, or emotional states may temporarily heighten distress in ways that feel overwhelming.
Additionally, MBSR and SE are not relaxation trainings. They involve active engagement with present-moment experience, including discomfort. Individuals primarily seeking passive relaxation may find it challenging or activating.
*Jungian-informed dream work requires a relatively stable sense of self, openness to both pleasant and unpleasant internal experiences, and a capacity for reality-testing.
For this reason, it may be more challenging when someone is experiencing an unstable sense of identity, significant dissociation, active substance misuse, or frequent extended periods of daydreaming or fantasy that interfere with functioning.
In those cases, more stabilizing or grounding forms of support may be more appropriate first.
**If the approaches I offer don’t seem like the best fit for your current needs, I may recommend working with a therapist trained in Dialectical Behavior Therapy. DBT is a structured, skills-based approach that can be especially helpful for individuals experiencing intense or rapidly shifting emotions, impulsivity, dissociation, self-harm, suicidality, eating concerns, or patterns of high-conflict relationships. It focuses on building practical skills for emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and behavioral stability. In these situations, a more structured level of care may be the most supportive starting point.