Therapy & Accelerated Hypnotherapy
I’m a Registered Psychotherapist in Ontario, Canada, as well as a trained hypnotherapist. I practice relational and psychodynamic therapy one-on-one as well as a form of clinical hypnosis known as Accelerated Hypnotherapy (also called Accelerated Clinical Hypnosis). It’s based on the groundbreaking healing work of Dr. Milton Erickson.
As a therapist in either modality, I draw from my long experience as a writer, a human, and witness in the world. I’ve been a mentor, professor and coach to creative people for almost thirty years. Long time practice of yoga and meditation give me respect and curiosity for our innate wisdom, as well as a love for the old cultures and languages that discovered, encoded and refined these sacred and holistic practices. I bow to my teachers living and ancient who have shared their gifts with me and with so many around the world.
I’m naturally down-to-earth, warm and empathic. FYI, I’m not afraid of clients who use swear words, cry, and ‘break down’. (I’ve had some practice in those areas myself.) Clinical expertise and ethical care are fundamental to my practice and my always-ongoing professional training.
I treat the whole person, and I bring my whole self to this healing work in a professional way. Brain-body-spirit: they braid us together, they connect us to those who have gone before and those who will come after; they touch each other and connect us to the earth and to all living beings. Our health is not just for us alone; it is for previous generations, our present families and communities, and for those who will follow us on this beautiful and wounded planet.
I specialize in the healing of trauma, attachment wounds, and states of “stuckness” and dysfunction. I work with the creative and gifted—those who have, to quote my colleague in giftedness, Paula Prober, ‘rain-forest minds.’ I often help ‘natural empaths’ whose empathy has been co-opted and used by others: parents, self-involved friends, family members, institutions. I facilitate the change that people are already in the process of making. I respect and enjoy the power of humour. Play and shared laughter are creative and life-giving. And fun!
I approach this work as creative and, at times, sacred experience with you and for you. In therapy, we get to know each other; the relationship is part of the healing experience. In our first session, I ask you some basic questions about what you want to explore together. I invite you to ask me questions. (Below, I describe my hypnotherapy work.)
As a therapist, I specialize in somatic awareness and am fully trained in OEI—Observed and Experiential Integration—a neuroscience-based somatic approach to healing trauma, anxiety and compulsive behaviours. I help people to learn about and change the way they “hold” stress and anxiety, both from current situations and from the past. In session, I often invite clients to become aware of bodily sensation, eye movement, and breathing patterns.
When we succeed in shifting painful old patterns or limiting beliefs, we change our brains (Plenty of research now proves this.) Accelerated Hypnotherapy makes this process a lot easier, faster, and, often, surprisingly fun!
We can literally change our minds by working with our brains and our deep creative minds. I find that idea—that reality, as shown on MRI scans of the brain—hopeful and liberating. I’ve experienced varying degrees of transformation not only with clients but with myself, in my own journey toward integration, health, and recovery from trauma and PTSD.
I believe we are, each of us, our own courage room. Sometimes we need help opening the doors and finding our way through.
Cultural awareness, sexual and racial diversity, and anti-racism are essential parts of my lifelong experience and continued learning in community. Different people in several cultures have taught me the art of listening. Though my training has been in English, I speak fluent Greek, Spanish, French and proficient Thai. Please inquire if you would like to speak or explore the use of these languages in session.
If you would like to make a preliminary appointment, please schedule an appointment using the form below. At the moment I practice mostly online (through Zoom) and by phone as my in-person sessions are full.
Areas of Specialization:
Accelerated Hypnotherapy / Clinical Hypnosis
In all my healing and educational work, I help people enter and become more at ease in ‘the courage room’ of the body-brain-spirit.
Clinical Hypnosis may provide a profound brain-body-spirit shift, a fluid often un-imagined movement into a new sense of possibility, even grace. This shift may come about when we work directly with the unconscious parts of the mind.
In Old Saxon, “to heal” means to become whole: integration is wholeness. Brain-body-spirit feel connected, left brain and right brain communicate better, past present future each feel possible, in their place, now and then.
This power of connection and integration is already inside each of us. With Accelerated Conversational Hypnotherapy, I help clients to connect to and access their own inner resources, including the power of the unconscious mind. These have brought you, and me, right here to this place.
Our inner resources have served us all our lives. They’ve enabled us to survive, sometimes to thrive. I’m with you as a person who is also healing and growing. I know through personal experience, an engaged life in the world, and years of clinical training and practice that sometimes we become weighed down by our painful patterns or our daily responsibilities. This is called ‘being human.’ Right?
We all need help sometimes to disentangle the neural pathways / habits / pain circuitry of the brain-body-spirit. This is also called ‘being human’.
Accelerated Conversational Hypnotherapy may aid a more rapid experience of integration. You know how, sometimes, when you’re wrestling with a problem or decision, and the answer, the clear decision, just ‘comes to you’? Suddenly an entanglement untangles, and you know the right course of action. Well, hypnotherapy (or clinical hypnosis—the experts can’t decide which term is the most correct, so I use them interchangeably) is a guided yet spontaneous form of that sort of untangling. By getting in touch—by having a conversation with—the unconsious mind, clarity and choice become more available.
As a registered psychotherapist, I specialize in a somatic and brain-based approach to help people heal from traumatic and adverse experiences. I bring these skills to my work as a hypnotherapist.
Not everyone needs to sign up for years of therapy. I’ve studied and personally benefited from Brief Focused Therapy and rapid transformational approaches, and, especially, OEI (Observed and Experiential Integration.)
In ACH, one to five (2-3 hour) sessions help clients’ problems—their knots—tend to loosen, get undone, and hopefully change. These sessions are longer than regular therapy sessions to facilitate the ‘deep dive’ that’s part of working with the unconscious mind. As such, due to the length of the sessions, the cost of is higher.
Observed and Experiential Integration Therapy (OEI) for PTSD, Anxiety, and “Stuckness”
I’m the first psychotherapist in Eastern Canada (and in the U.S.) to offer OEI, somatic and brain-focused trauma work developed by Audrey Cook and Dr. Rick Bradshaw in Vancouver, Canada.
OEI engages the eyes, the body, and breath awareness to work with and resolve intrusive traumatic memory and alleviate symptoms of panic, anxiety attacks, and repetitive stuck states like procrastination and phobias.
OEI shares some qualities with EMDR (Eye Movement, Desensitization, and Reprocessing) though it’s not a manualized modality. Rather than having a set series of steps and procedures, the therapist chooses the techniques of OEI according to the client’s needs. It’s subtle work, and tolerable for those who have prolonged or early childhood trauma (CPTSD).
With OEI, clients learn to manage intense emotional reactions (triggers) through their eyes, breath, and conscious attention. I teach people how to do this on their own, so when triggers and emotional overwhelm related to trauma and anxiety arise, people can calm themselves and feel stable again.
The muscles around and in the eyes, head and neck work together in complex ways. In turn, they are also connected to specific areas of our brains. By directing eye focus and movement, we can work with traumatic memory and feeling. Despite OEI’s neurological complexity, it’s an elegant, surprisingly direct way of working with trauma and anxiety.
My first experience of OEI took place twenty years ago—as a therapy client, when I was struggling to manage intrusive and scary PTSD symptoms that left me feeling disorganized and exhausted. OEI gave me a way to first manage and then to calm and integrate those symptoms.
At that time, the end of the 1990s and beginning of the 2000s, I’d already had several damaging and retraumatizing experiences with counsellors and therapists who knew very little about treating PTSD. Luckily, I discovered Observed and Experiential Integration Therapy.
Relationship Conflicts, Ostracism & Religious Trauma
I respect spiritual and religious practices. I’m a long-time meditator and yoga practitioner. During and after living in Thailand as a teenager, I studied Theravada Buddhism (and I’m still studying it, along with other schools of Buddhist thought.) Over the years, I’ve formally and informally studied and practiced bhakti (devotional) yoga and other traditions. One of my books, The Lizard Cage, is partly an exploration of how to use meditation for survival and inner freedom, even in highly stressful circumstances.
I also have clients who struggle with, question or reject their religious and spiritual traditions. OEI is effective for exploring and resolving religious trauma, cancel culture/doxing, and the damaging experience of ostracism. (The book is set in a prison.)
Being shunned or ostracized—rejected by a group of people we care about--may feel like death, because it is, in fact, social death. It’s a highly damaging and painful experience, and increasingly common due to our increased use of and visibility in online communities, where these kind of attacks have become normalized. This includes victims of call-out culture, academic mobbing, and social media bullying—areas in which I actively study and seek professional education. At any age, this experience can be a devastating, life-altering experience.
My family was harmed by religious shunning when I was a child and adolescent. I’ve worked hard to understand and integrate my personal history and to learn about working professionally with people who’ve had similar experiences, whether in friend groups, families, professional organizations or through social media.
Frequently Asked Questions
I don’t have a history of trauma. Will you still work with me?
Of course. Trauma is not a prerequisite to working with a therapist. We can explore your needs and desires in various ways. I will listen. We will talk. We all have bodies, though, so somatic awareness and even some movement usually comes into the equation in my approach to counselling. Our emotions and our stories live in our bodies, sometimes without language, so I invite your body to communicate, too.
How does OEI actually work?
In OEI, the therapist helps the client bring awareness to their body, their breath and their eye movements in an effort to track symptoms of dissociation, fear, sadness and bodily sensations associated with PTSD and intense anxiety. Working with the eyes can have a powerful effect on the brain and nervous system. I ask the client to uncover and cover their eyes, one at a time, as we move through a series of questions about physical and emotional sensations.
Over several sessions, by gently and slowly guiding a person to observe and experience different states related to visual and somatic (body) memories of past trauma, I help the client to process and integrate various memories and sensations. This processing and integration helps to resolve PTSD symptoms or at least make them more manageable. I teach my clients how to use OEI on themselves.
Neuroscience research, aided by MRI scan technology, now shows how traumatic emotional memory—even if we don’t recall precise scenes and people, but only feelings--affects different parts of our brains. Because of the close eye-to-brain-connection, someone who has experienced trauma sometimes ‘sees’ and feels emotional states differently through one eye or the other.
You can research OEI further at: sightpsych.com/faqs-oei
Under the Home Page tab on the website above, you can also watch a Ted Talk of Dr. Rick Bradshaw explaining some of the neurobiological theory behind OEI as well as several therapeutic techniques.
Do I have PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder)?
Our understanding of trauma is more complex and generous than it was even a decade ago. A traumatic experience doesn’t have to be loud and violent to leave a lasting negative effect on a human being. We are resilient creatures, but our big, complex brains make us vulnerable to intense and frightening stimuli.
Bullying at any age, ‘benign’ neglect in childhood, physical or emotional incest, repeated verbal aggression, abandonment by a friend, friend group or partner—all of these may leave people wrestling with intense traumatic stress that others may not understand or fully appreciate.
Trauma in childhood often means that separations and abandonments in adulthood may be experienced as intensely traumatic all over again. Clinical diagnoses can be important, even life-saving, but you are the expert of your own life. Each of us know when we feel broken, damaged and deeply hurt. I do not diagnose: diagnosis is outside the scope of my work. However, my work does not depend upon a clinical diagnosis of PTSD. I supply the list below to help anyone who is struggling to put words to their symptoms. One thing we do know is that trauma affects the language-processing areas of our brains—so finding language for the feelings of traumatic experience can be a challenge and, when accomplished, a relief.
Common PTSD symptoms include but are not limited to:
-family of origin disconnection and high conflict
-sexual and intimacy difficulties in romantic relationship, including inability to commit or meet a commitment-making partner
-depression, persistent fears and phobias, extreme nervousness, uncontrollable worrying
-anger management difficulties, feelings of rage
-periods of daily crying, often due to feelings of isolation and abandonment
-hypervigilance and heightened startle response (you become viscerally expectant of and frightened by loud sounds or sudden movements)
-insomnia and nightmares
-dissociation (a sense of not fully inhabiting your own body or ‘disappearing’ under conditions of stress)
-nervous system dysregulation (the experience of physical or emotional overwhelm by external and internal triggers) and freezing or numbing of certain body parts.
-intrusive traumatic memory even if the individual cannot ‘see’ exactly what happened
-eating disorders, addictive behaviours, substance addictions
-conditions now linked to ACES—Adverse Childhood Experience—such as hypertension, fibromyalgia, obesity, depression and others
Addiction is often a strong indicator of PTSD, though not always. Sometimes addictions are habits that we just can't get a handle on. Hypnotherapy can be an effective way of treating addiction, though I haven't specialized in the treatment of addictions. Gabor Maté asks wise, empathic question, “Not why the addiction, but why the pain?”
While I work with clients who have PTSD symptoms and addictive behaviours, I will not have sessions with patients who are under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
RATES:
My regular therapy sessions are $180. Please contact me directly below if you’d like to have a complimentary 15-20 minute discovery phone call for regular therapy.
At this time, I’m not able to offer more reduced rate spots. In general, I work long-term with people, and presently my reduced rate positions are filled, though it doesn’t hurt to ask.
At this time, I accept e-transfer, wire transfer and Paypal.
For hypnotherapy patients, I offer a 30-40 minute discovery call by phone or Zoom.