What’s is integrative therapy?
As an integrative therapist, I draw from several approaches rather than using one fixed method for everyone. This allows therapy to be flexible, collaborative, and responsive to your history, needs, values, culture, relationships, and goals.
The approaches below are not separate formulas or prepackaged treatments. They are frameworks that inform how I listen, understand, and work with each person.
Relational and psychodynamic therapy: Past experiences, early relationships, and unconscious patterns may be shaping your current emotions, relationships, and ways of coping.
Supports deeper insight and self-understanding, so old patterns can become less automatic.
Pay attention to trust, closeness, conflict, boundaries, and the ways you connect with others.
The therapy relationship is an important place for awareness and change.
Mindfulness, Compassion, and Buddhist Psychology:
Focuses on how suffering is created and relieved in the mind.
Supports greater self-awareness, acceptance, and the ability to relate to difficult thoughts and emotions with more steadiness and care.
Increases self-compassion, clarification of values, interconnection, and nonharming.
Does not require adhearance to any Buddhist or religious beliefs.
Approaches that incorporate mindfulness, acceptance, and compassion, such as ACT, MBSR, MBCT, and DBT, have all been influenced by Buddhist psychology.
Acceptance-based and mindfulness-based cognitive behavioral approaches:
Combines practical tools with present-moment awareness.
Increases capacity notice thoughts, emotions, and habits without immediately getting pulled into them.
This does not mean forcing yourself to “think positive” or trying to eliminate difficult feelings. Instead, the focus is on changing how you relate to your inner experience, so you have more room for choice, self-compassion, and action that reflects your values.
Trauma-informed therapy: Recognizes how trauma can shape emotions, relationships, the body, and the nervous system.
Emphasizes safety, trust, collaboration, and pacing, so therapy feels supportive rather than overwhelming.
Helps us move carefully and respectfully, without pushing too quickly or treating protective responses as flaws.
Feminist therapy: Explores how social, cultural, and systemic forces shape mental health, identity, relationships, and self-understanding.
Values intersectionality, collaboration, and empowerment, and supports clients in building voice, agency, and self-trust.
While rooted in feminist principles, it is inclusive of people of all genders.