There is no such thing as a bad emotion.
Warm, direct, articulate, gentle, silly, sometimes a bit boisterous when I’m excited, very earnest.
Observe patterns, deepen the capacity for awareness of body and mind, face uncomfortable truths with candor and care, generously and specifically affirm the heck out of your innate goodness, and foster a relationship with the self that allows for greater safety, creativity, inspiration, and fulfillment.
INFP / Scorpio sun Capricorn moon Leo rising / Enneagram 8 w 7
Accepting what’s in there! People are full of dynamic, vivid, and sometimes contradicting and seemingly unreasonable forces and emotions that can be hard to put into words and sometimes doesn’t make sense at first glance. More important than trying to force what is inside you to make sense is just to learn to hear it and feel it exactly as it’s coming up. I have unshakeable faith that it will eventually make sense, even if not the way we had anticipated, if we allow ourselves to witness it as fully as we can.
I’ll ask you what your body is feeling, often. I’ll slow you down sometimes. I’ll talk about “parts”, make space for multiple different opinions, desires, and needs arising inside you, normalize that tension, and help you create connection between those different parts of you. I’ll help you detach from harmful standards and expectations learned from oppressive systems and take an affirming approach to your identity, qualities, and what you need to thrive.
I think much of what therapy is about is learning to become fluent in the language that your body is speaking to you about your emotions, needs, intuition and boundaries. It’s possible we can understand in some part what we’re feeling and even clearly understand the story that led to that feeling, without fully letting ourselves feel it. Finding a way to express that emotion and let it teach us what it has to teach requires that we descend below what we think we know about what’s happening, and instead of thinking, listen directly to what is felt. Some folks really struggle to feel in that way, and building that ability to listen and feel directly into the felt sense in your body can take some time, and that’s okay, and necessary. There’s no rush. When you know how to listen to what your emotions are telling you about what you need and to validate them even without fully 100% understanding them and where they come from, we can shift from trying to make sense of our emotions to generously and compassionately responding to them and supporting ourselves through them in an attuned way. Connecting the dots and making sense of emotions can feel good and we will do that, but you don’t need to make exact rational sense to be valid and deserve that care!
I often take an IFS-inspired approach when working with people because it provides a great framework to hold the complex and sometimes contradicting multiplicity of feelings and stories inside us with tenderness and curiosity. I sometimes use an Acceptance and Commitment framework to help people shift patterns in their life in a more direct way if it feels right. I work in a trauma-informed way, and will be able to provide EMDR therapy starting in November. Ultimately, what frameworks I use and how directive or person-centered I am is based on what you’re looking for in therapy.
My focus areas are working with LGBTQIA people, neurodivergent or gifted people, creatives, and people with trauma. In particular, I work well with people who are growing through complex trauma related to relationships, either with the family of origin, a previous partner, school or work environment, or more broadly their relationship with the culture they exist within. In particular, I do a lot of somatic-focused work, which can be both kind of difficult and very helpful if you’re the type of person who “thinks” their feelings, and it can also be helpful if you’re the type of person that feels emotions very deeply in a way where it feels hard to move through them.
An eclectic mix of anti-oppression, queer/trans, neurodivergent/gifted/”weird”/”smart”, spiritual, creative!
People who have had experiences that taught them to value themselves less and struggle with their relationship with themself. This could pertain to someone who had an abusive upbringing or romantic relationship. It could be people who either personally have or have been involved with someone with narcissistic traits. It could be someone who exists in a way that the overculture in our society devalues, who doesn’t feel welcome in this world and carries that alienation with them.
Abusive romantic or familial relationships, neurodivergence, spiritual exploration, developing a relationship with creativity, fulfillment and inspiration.
A deep, patient listener, full of insightful reframes, aggressively affirming (that one made me laugh). One person said my superpower was my well timed silliness, and I felt very seen by that!
Humor, largely. It’s okay to be afraid, it’s okay to make mistakes, it’s okay to want to distract yourself instead of facing difficulty, it’s okay to fall back on old coping strategies, it’s okay to have blind spots! Bringing gentle humor to those moments is one of my favorite ways to move through shame and some of that unpleasant intensity and invite you into a place of curiosity about that challenging edge.
I think widening and giving spaciousness to hold intensity is one of my strengths. Therapy is much about gradually building a sense of faith that we can weather intense emotions safety, and my role is holding space for you to be in that edge territory in a way where you feel my supportive company, while helping you keep an eye on where your limits are and helping you come back to safety and ground if it becomes too much for you at that time.
The intersection of relational trauma and neurodivergence!
Compassion, not judgment, is required in order for us to see ourselves clearly.
Play and whimsy are as important as love, grief and rage.
Systems of oppression impact everyone in the world differently, and an intersectional understanding of identity is necessary in therapy work.
The suffering that we experience within these systems is not pathological, it is a normal response to harmful conditions.
It’s good for the whole world when even one person learns to know themselves deeply.
Words are not a whole map of reality, much we can experience will never be described by anyone!
I grew up in the woods, and have experienced the natural world as an infinitely generous source of insight and understanding. I had a pretty life changing meditation sitting in my favorite field in Burlington, Vermont a few years ago. That experience, and many following it, has convinced me that quiet, generous presence yields truly unimaginable insight, and that every inch of the world and every perspective in it has something to teach us about being. I carry that curious attentiveness and willingness to hear and to learn into session with each client I work with.
It seems clear to me that we can create a more egalitarian, compassionate, and healthy community by encouraging each person to deeply care for themselves and to feel deserving of the effort of that care.
I believe that once we feel deserving of care and have a better sense of our own needs and desires, we feel fuller, more resourced, and more sure of what is right for us. It becomes a lot easier to be generous and connected with others in a way that feels safe, joyful and wise from that grounded and resourced place. I feel like bringing more of that into being has a powerfully healing ripple effect in the world and our communities, and I want that for us.
I like to think that people are both a product of, and a spirited and liberated response to, their lived experiences. This is certainly true for me. I grew up in the middle of nowhere in Upstate New York within a family that carried a pretty significant legacy of rural trauma and poverty, and was the recipient of that lineage. Like many iterations of family before me, I found resilience in music, and in learning to connect deeply with people and the land. I am proud to have inherited both the struggles and the magic that is carried in my family legacy, and I feel gratitude to be able to cast my own version of a liberated and spirited response to the larger story I exist within. Part of that response was starting from a place of connection and curiosity and moving toward my own history with a desire to heal the parts of the story that still sting after all those generations of transmission. Having done that work for a decade in therapy and independently, the process felt so valuable, meaningful, fascinating and just plain good that I chose to work as a therapist.
I am white, I am a nonbinary queer, I am spiritual in a very fluid, grounded and nondogmatic way, I am mostly able bodied and exist in a smaller body, I am an older sister, I am a gardener, I am a musician and artist, and I am neurodivergent.
I believe that each person’s life story is a singularly invaluable, irreplaceable source of wisdom. I think therapy is a place to learn how to listen to and truly sense yourself and all you contain. As a therapist, I think of myself as an amplifier of what I hear in you to support you becoming more intimate with yourself, and also as someone to safely disagree with to clarify your own sense of your inner authority and wisdom about yourself! I am using the frameworks I have learned to reflect back with clarity, and I am listening with care, deep respect, and an unshakeable belief in the essential goodness of people which can contain all the complexity and imperfection that exists in a person. My hope is that in therapy, you can develop your own style of compassionate and respectful listening to all parts of yourself, even the ones that are really difficult to witness right now. I defer to your expertise on you, your feelings, and your life.
People with relational and single-event trauma, neurodivergent and gifted people, people who are learning to feel instead of think their feelings, people who are in the LGBTQIA+ community, and more generally people who are working through an identification with being a weird person. 🙂
Humility. I am curious about things I’m not familiar with. I don’t assume to know more than is offered, and I let people form my understanding of them with what they offer. I ask questions directly! I understand that connection requires honesty and effort, and that effort is a pleasure to me.
I am a social worker, so that’s a lot of how my approach is informed: acknowledging the systemic aspects of our experience is a necessary piece of doing this work. I can serve as an affirming, grounding presence, offering coping strategies to create resilience in the face of nebulous, sticky and burdensome feelings relating to the oppressive overculture, and I can also be a sort of sidekick in sleuthing around for ways to plug into community with others who are experiencing similar challenges or shared identity pieces, such as therapy and process groups, community gathering spaces, and volunteer and advocacy opportunities.
I am very curious about philosophy and history, and spend a lot of time reading and having conversations with friends about what we read! I deeply love plants and I garden and forage in the warmer months. I go out to explore nature every chance I get. I also paint and play the cello!
I play cello and paint, and with both of these practices, it feels like I’m not in control of what I’m doing as it’s happening. It’s more something that spontaneously emerges out of me, and if I want to see it through, I have to trust it and let it happen without having a grasp on it. Often looking at or listening to things I’ve made brings a lot of insight after the fact. I think similarly, expressing oneself can be necessary to understanding, rather than the other way around, and I encourage people not to feel like they need to know what they’re gonna say before they say it!
You only need to tell me the name of a plant one time and I will never forget it or fail to recognize it. It has been this way since I was a young child. It’s odd that I only got into herbalism and foraging a couple years ago, because it has been a very helpful talent for those hobbies!
Neurodivergence-Affirming Therapy – B Lourenco, LMHC
Polyvagal Theory: Principles & Practice for Individuals- Deb Dana, LCSW
Quieting the Mind (Personhood Level I) Hakomi Workshop- Seattle Hakomi
I am also enrolled in an EMDR certification course this summer to be able to offer EMDR in the fall!
Constantly reading, listening to podcasts, and attending seminar and discussion groups to expose myself to new perspectives and reflect on how to apply them in practice.
A bachelor of Social Work, three years as a community support specialist, three years as a preschool teacher in a Reggio-Emilia inspired preschool, several years as a working musician, an attempted but incomplete Master of Comparative Religion, a summer as a farmer, and finally, a Master of Social Work.
Learning and the different ways to learn, the apparently hereditary nature of certain patterns of relationship to power, generational and historical trauma and the specific impacts of certain collective experiences on culture (specifically the effect on our culture and sense of self created by the creation of the concept of “heresy” in the earlier days of Christianity), mysticism, folk spirituality.
Continue to deepen my connection to communities who are doing work devoted to innovating trauma therapy in ways that center social justice and collective liberation.
More deeply and sensitively acknowledge culture patterns and differentiate them from more individualized things like self image, self talk, or personal beliefs, and be able to really engage clients in learning how to distinguish between them and approach them differently. Therapists, I think, should both be clinicians and culture archaeologists!
Get a feel for each other! I will ask you a lot about your life generally to get a super zoomed-out version of your life, and you can ask me about myself as a therapist! We will talk about what you’re looking to work on, what has and hasn’t worked if you’ve been in therapy previously, and if there’s anything you’re particularly excited or nervous about starting out with me.
You can contact me via Email. I answer emails within 48 hours on business days. As a rule, I prefer communication outside of session to mainly be about scheduling, but I don’t mind occasional thought-dump emails midweek if you’re okay with me not responding in depth. We can talk about the thoughts next session and it can be a nice way to hold yourself accountable for mentioning it in session!
I offer long term therapy, in the form of weekly one hour sessions, with the option for more if you need that. As far as where I focus, I think that talking about the past is important and can help create a feeling of being understood where you’re at now to feel like I have the context, and talking about the future can help us gain a sense of where we’re going and what we want to do, but for me, what’s most important is the present moment. What do you want in this moment? What do you need? How can you tell what you need? What is challenging you now? How can we create systems to support you in meeting those challenges and making changes that reflect what feels true about your current wants and needs? My hope is that we can help you move into a greater degree of groundedness and connection with the present so that the choices you make now really support your wellbeing, however you’re defining that, and pop you out into a future you’re excited to exist in.
I think if you’re just coming to therapy during the week and forgetting about it most of the rest of the time, it won’t work as well! That’s why I give homework… well, more like invitations into certain reflective practices during the week that build off what we are working on in session. I think planning during session to create space to deepen into what we talk about in session in your own time can really help to reinforce positive changes and keep your intentions top of mind, even when life swirls you up within its routines and cycles. I’ll ask you about how it went during the week because it can be really interesting to reflect on, but you’ll never catch hell from me if you didn’t do your homework 🙂 It’s just an opportunity for some gentle accountability.
