Frequently Asked Questions & Answers

You might consider therapy if you feel stuck, overwhelmed, or if your emotions seem hard to manage. If you find that past experiences keep affecting your current relationships or your ability to enjoy life, therapy could be a supportive space to explore these issues and build new ways of coping.

If your benefits cover Registered Psychotherapist, you may be eligible for reimbursement. Please inquire with your provider to see what your unique plan entails.

If you have coverage, you typically pay for your sessions upfront, and receipts are provided for you to submit to your insurance for reimbursement.

I offer limited spots of sliding scale for clients with financial barriers or those who are full time students. To make therapy more accessible, these low-cost sessions will be available to each eligible new client for 6 months. Please inquire.

It's normal to worry about what to say in a first meeting, but it's your therapist's responsibility to help you get the conversation going. The consultation session is often an introduction for both parties. It’s a chance for you to share your story and for the therapist to learn about your concerns. Typically, you will talk about what brings you to therapy, your brief history, and your goals. The therapist explains their approach and answers your questions. It’s a time to build a basic connection and feel if the space is comfortable for you, and it's YOU who is interviewing the therapist, and decide whether you like this therapist or not.

The initial 1-4 sessions is the history-taking phase, aimed at getting a more comprehensive understanding of your life. During this time, the therapist might ask more direct questions regarding your family, relationships, and life experiences, but will do so in a careful and trauma-informed way. This approach ensures that you only discuss what you feel comfortable sharing, and the therapist will refrain from further inquiry if they perceive any reluctance on your part. You will not be expected to talk about anything you feel unsafe to share. Safety and trust takes time to build.

Psychoanalytic/Psychodynamic therapy is a form of talk therapy that focuses on how your past experiences, especially from childhood, shape your current thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. In simple terms, it helps you uncover hidden or unconscious feelings that may be influencing your life now. Even though we will talk about a lot of past experiences, the goal is to bring these feelings to light so you can understand them better at the present moment, and work through unresolved issues, releasing you from past constraints, leading to more self-awareness and freedom in your current and future life.

In our sessions, we will work collaboratively to uncover underlying conflicts and unresolved issues, fostering self-awareness, increasing emotional capacity, and promoting healing from within.

Somatic therapy is a healing method that based on the body-mind connection. It acknowledges that our bodies can retain stress or trauma without our conscious awareness. Instead of only talking about feelings, this therapy helps you tune into physical sensations—like tension or heaviness—and use them as guidance for your healing. The goal is to release built-up tension from past experiences and help you have a better relationship with your body.

Relational therapy centers on the importance of relationships in your life, especially the attachments you developed with your care givers. It looks at how the way you interact with your therapist reflects your interactions with other people. In this approach, the focus is on creating a warm and supportive connection in the therapy room. By exploring these patterns together, you learn how to build healthier, more fulfilling relationships outside of therapy as well.

Trauma refers to an experience that overwhelms your ability to cope. It can be an event or series of events that leave you feeling unsafe, helpless, or deeply disturbed. Trauma affects both your emotions and body, and it can lead to lasting changes in how you relate to the world. It’s not just about what happened, but also about how those events were experienced and stored in your mind and body.

Emotions are the immediate, automatic responses your body has to a situation—like a racing heart or a rush of anger. Feelings are the way you interpret and make sense of those emotions. In simple terms, emotions are the raw data, while feelings are the story you create about that data.

Transference is when feelings and patterns from your past gently mix with your experiences in the present. It happens in every relationship—not just in therapy. For example, if you once felt hurt by someone close to you, you might find yourself reacting similarly when someone today acts in a similar way, even if they’re not the same person and have different intentions. In this way, your past experiences shape your current feelings, and you might unconsciously bring those old emotions into new relationships, including therapy. Analyzing transference in therapy can help you understand yourself better and learn how to form healthier connections.

It's also important to note that not all feelings are due to transference. For instance, if you feel angry at the therapist who arrives late, your anger is justified in the present moment, not solely rooted in past experiences. Only when the anger is disproportionate, there might be transference at play.