Therapy & Accelerated Hypnotherapy
Talk therapy is helpful, yes. But often not helpful enough. The body, the brain, the whole nervous system are ‘involved’ in our relationships; they’re the physical reality of our learning, healing, changing. As a long-time published writer, I know for a fact that words are important. And often over-rated.
Do you need courage for your next big step? Think of how you learned to walk, once upon a time. And forgot. Right? You forgot how you learned to walk. It’s possible to remember the good things you need too.
You already know how to take the next step. Working in a somatic, brain-smart way will help you get there with more ease.
Or, say you often get triggered. F***ing angry. Stuck on the same hurtful incident for weeks, months? (Years?) Let’s work together to stop that energy drain and change up your brain with neuro-exercises and self-empathy. Self-connection is probably the most-important, least-talked-about “goal” of therapy. And that’s what we explore, brain-body-spirit.
Then we extend that empathic self-connection outward, into the circle of your relationships to other people, to your work and play, to your communities, even to your ancestral history. I work with the whole brain-to-body-to-emotional world story. Therapy may be hard. With me, it's also fun, funny, & creative, an unfolding of deep intelligence and practical resource.
We're more powerful than we believe.
(And I know that you already know that.)
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I’m a Registered Psychotherapist, author and clinical hypnotist in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
I practice Accelerated Hypnosis, an effective method to help people make significant life changes using the power of the unconscious mind.
I'm also an expert in OEI—Observed Experiential Integration—a somatic + neuroscience-based approach for working directly with the body and brain to heal trauma & anxiety. I'm the only psychotherapist in Eastern Canada who offers this pretty extraordinary modality. We understand so much about how our brains and nervous systems—our whole bodies—affect our emotional and relational lives. That’s why it makes so much sense to wisely and efficiently work with the brain to heal emotional hurts and dysfunction.
As you already may know, therapy is a learn-to-heal and learn-to-be relationship. Yes, it can be hard. With me, it can also be fun, funny, & creative, an unfolding discovery of your deepest intelligence & practical abilities and resources.
Like you, I am a human in the world. Vocation-wise, I’m a therapist and writer. I’m also a business person, a mother, a wife, a sister, a mentor, a friend, the shunned member of a cultish religion, a traveller, a polyglot, a person with a history of complex trauma. I’ve been a mentor, professor and coach to creative people for over thirty years.
A lifetime of practicing yoga and meditation give me respect and curiosity for our innate wisdom, as well as a love and respect for the old cultures, languages and peoples responsible for discovering, encoding and refining these wisdom practices. I bow to my teachers living and ancient who have shared their gifts with me and with many others around the world.
I’m naturally down-to-earth, warm and empathic. FYI, I’m not afraid of patients who use swear words, cry, and ‘break down’. (I’ve had long practice in those areas myself.) Clinical expertise and ethical care are fundamental to my therapeutic work and my always-ongoing professional training. Cultural awareness, respect for sexual and racial diversity, and anti-racism are essential parts of my lifelong experience and continued learning in community. Some of that education has been here in Toronto, Ontario; a lot of it has been out in the world (Greece, Thailand, Myanmar, Spain, France, Iraq.)
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 hold us to this beautiful earth, our first mother. Good psychotherapy and somatic healing in this moment also extends to the past, to previous generations, to our present families and communities, and to those who may follow us.
I specialize in the healing of trauma, attachment wounds, and states of “stuckness” and dysfunction. I often work with the creative and gifted. Fellow empaths often find me, especially those whose empathy has been co-opted by others: parents, self-involved friends, family members, institutions.
I approach psychotherapy with my Greek language expertise in mind. Psyche, in ancient and modern Greek, means soul. This is soul work; we do it together with the emphasis on your growth. Our relationship becomes part of the healing.
Scroll a little further down to learn about my clinical hypnosis work. Hypnotherapy can be part of any psychotherapy work. I offer a special experience of clinical hypnosis.
When we succeed in shifting painful old patterns or limiting beliefs, we change our brains. Plenty of research now proves this.
We can literally change our minds by working with our brains and other parts of our nervous systems. I find that idea—that reality, as shown on MRI scans—hopeful and liberating. I’ve experienced varying degrees of transformation not only with clients but with myself, in my own journey toward health.
Different people in several cultures have taught me the art of listening and looking. 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.
Our inner resources have served us all our lives. They’ve enabled us to survive, sometimes to thrive. At times, we all need help to “disentangle” the neural pathways / habits / pain circuitry of the brain-body-spirit.
Accelerated Conversational Hypnotherapy is . . . kind of weird. You know how, sometimes, when you’re wrestling with a problem or decision, and the answer 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 also spontaneous form of that mysterious ‘achieving clarity”. By getting in touch—by having a conversation with—the unconsious mind, clarity and choice become more available.
ACH usually focuses on one particular problem.
In this modality, I offer one to five (2-3 hour) sessions to help clients’ “solve” this problem, which may be a phobia, a compulsive habit, a specific relational pattern, or a particular limiting belief. 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 for this service is higher.
Observed and Experiential Integration Therapy (OEI) for PTSD, Anxiety, and “Stuckness”
I’m the only 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 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.
Relationship Conflicts, Friend Trauma, Ostracism
I respect spiritual and religious practices. I’m a long-time meditator and yoga practitioner. During and after living in Thailand as a student, I studied Theravada Buddhism (an education that is ongoing!)) Over the years, I’ve formally and informally learned and practiced bhakti (devotional) yoga and other yogic traditions as well. One of my books, The Lizard Cage, is 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. Often this can be part of friend trauma—abusive friend relationships that often end painfully (though the effects may be felt for years).
Being shunned or ostracized—rejected by a group of a person or people we care about--may feel like death, because it is, in fact, social death. It’s a damaging 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 grievously harmed by religious shunning when I was a child and adolescent. This left a pattern in my own brain-body-spirit that I often repeated, especially in friend relationships. I’ve worked hard to understand, heal and integrate my personal history into my professional work and to keep learning about how these patterns express, whether in friend groups, families, or in academic or religious organizations.
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 prefer not to have sessions with patients who are under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
RATES:
My regular therapy sessions are $220. Please contact me directly below if you’d like to have a complimentary 15-20 minute discovery phone call for regular therapy.
In general, I work long-term with people, and presently my reduced rate positions are filled.
At this time, I accept e-transfer and Paypal.
For hypnotherapy patients, I offer a 30-40 minute discovery call by phone or Zoom. Due to the length of the sessions, the cost for this service is higher than regular therapy.