Where Uncertainty Meets
Understanding
A Journey Inward
My Growth-Focused Infertility Support for Individuals, Couples & Groups is
rooted in three core components and methodologies:
- $ 100
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Compassionate Inquiry®
This is the primary approach I use to help clients recognize mental-emotional patterns and triggers that limit their wholeness, choice and freedom.
- $ 100
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Positive Psychology
I bring in the theory and tools of Positive Psychology to support growth, liberate your innate strengths and help you live according to your deepest values.
- $ 100
-
Trauma-Informed Care
A profound understanding of trauma and its broad effects underpins my work to ensure the necessary presence, attunement, compassion and safety.
Life isn’t linear, and neither is my approach to infertility therapy.
The way I work with clients is dynamic and customized to each individual, couple and group I work with. I simultaneously address areas for healing and growth. This unique approach I have created gets my clients exponentially better results.
As you’ll read below, Compassionate Inquiry®, Positive Psychology and Trauma-Informed Care are a potent trio that address, amongst others, the uncertainty that emerges as a major challenge during infertility. My approach inevitably also prepares you for the uncertainty you may face in other areas of life.
Please note: All my private and group work sessions are gender inclusive and do not require couple participation. My approach to infertility therapy is appropriate whether you are struggling with your infertility, your partner’s infertility or infertility with unknown causes.
Compassionate Inquiry®: Understanding Uncertainty
Infertility can feel like the ultimate loss of control — stirring up our deepest fears and unrelenting anxiety. What do with these overwhelming experiences?
By default, we resort to whatever coping mechanisms are most familiar to us. Many of these were taught to us directly or indirectly in childhood. Others we developed as we made our way in the adult world.
These coping mechanisms may have kept you safe in the past, so you had no reason to question them. But now, as you encounter the life-changing challenge of infertility, they might just reinforce your isolation and even feed feelings of shame and guilt.
Still, it may feel like the last thing you want to do right now is explore the origins of how you handle stress, change, and upheaval. That’s understandable. It takes a little bit of courage to get started. Once you take that first step, though, Compassionate Inquiry® can help you find the next.
Compassionate Inquiry®, a psychotherapeutic approach developed by Dr. Gabor Maté, offers a gentle way to examine the underpinnings of our emotional responses, the stories we tell ourselves, the assumptions we make, and the expectations we have for ourselves and the world we live in.
Together, we can make sense of day-to-day thoughts, feelings, and behaviors so that being present to your own needs, feelings, and experiences becomes possible again. Cultivating compassion in this way is absolutely essential in the face of uncertainty — which infertility — and all of life — are teeming with.
Positive Psychology: A Path to Possibility
Where Compassionate Inquiry® examines the challenges in our inner workings, Positive Psychology looks at growth opportunities that spring from our challenges.
Sometimes, Positive Psychology is misunderstood to be ‘positive thinking.’ While we can work on mindfulness and gratitude with Positive Psychology, this method of therapy is much more than happy-go-lucky mantras and trying to see the bright side of things.
By tapping into the science of well-being, Positive Psychology leverages your values, virtues, and strengths to create real meaning, resilience, and supportive self-acceptance. My clients often find deep wisdom and a connection to who they are with Positive Psychology.
As infertility challenges cut to the very core of our being, it is common for people to question their very identity and doubt that life has much meaning without parenthood. Even in the direst of moments, we can gently yet firmly guide ourselves back to our values and make sense of our lives. Giving ourselves the gift of our own presence is incredibly important, considering how dejected we can feel in the midst of uncertainty.
Trauma-Informed Care: Feeling Seen, Heard, and Whole on Your Journey
As a trauma-informed care provider, I work from a whole-person perspective that considers how your past and present life experiences may impact your day-to-day life. As a guiding principle, I consider you, my client, whole as you are, and therefore as you show up in each session. In other words, there is nothing to fix about you. There are only possibilities ahead, should you wish to examine those and ultimately feel ready.
I also consider unique cultural affiliations and identity experiences in our work together.
Establishing safety and gaining your trust is vital to a successful therapeutic relationship and I believe that the best way I can do that is through always seeking to see, hear, feel and understand where you are at in any given moment, where you are coming from and where you are headed so that I can best support you on your journey.
“TRAUMA is NOT WHAT HAPPENS to you, it’s
WHAT HAPPENS INSIDE you as a RESULT of
WHAT HAPPENS to you. IT is NOT the BLOW on the head, BUT the CONCUSSION you get.”
— Dr. Gabor Maté, trauma specialist, bestselling author and founder of Compassionate Inquiry®
