Finding Your Self With Compassion
We haven’t lost ourselves—we’ve just been masked by what was never ours to carry. The truth is, our real self has never left us. It is here and holding out a kind hand
Until Your Voice is Heard
Healing isn’t about becoming someone new—it’s about remembering the home within yourself. Here we hold the belief that everyone has the capacity to heal, and that begins when we feel safe enough to slow down and listen to all the parts that have been pushed aside. It’s through connection and compassion, especially with yourself, you begin to unburden what was never yours to hold onto. As you witness and welcome every part of who you are, something shifts—there’s more space, more breath, more choice. And from that space, life opens up with new possibilities for joy, creativity, and freedom.
Guiding Approaches…
Internal Family Systems
Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS) gets to the very heart of healing—body, mind, and soul. IFS is a deeply collaborative therapeutic approach that fully embraces your entire being—every identity, every part. As a trained IFS Therapist (Level One graduate by the IFS-Institute), I am your guide and walking companion in this practice. It is hard work, yet profoundly transformative because here we focus on your empowerment in building deep trust in your authentic self while fostering meaningful connection with the world around you.
We will focus on compassionate and insightful guidance into your internal landscape, helping you to establish and sustain a sense of grounding and connectedness. When you find yourself in a place where you feel safely held and experience presence, then together we will invite your fear, your grief, your sadness, your anger, your pain into the room and bear witness. All are welcome—to be seen, to be heard, to be known. For healing happens in connection to them. This is the work, the path home to yourself. What has been in the way, is the way. And the pace is set at the speed of trust and relationship,
This is the compassionate, gentle, and patient work of healing trauma. We slowly sow the seeds of acceptance of all that you are that will ground you in this process of finding yourself. This is parts work, giving yourself the gift of a trusting bond with yourself.
Grief Therapy
Grief therapy with me is a space for your truth and voice. Too often we hear that grief is only about death, which limits our ability to truly honor the breadth of grief in our life—it’s also about loss of identity, safety, connection, and belonging. I work with those who feel lost, stuck, unworthy, or like they’ve never truly fit. Together, we make space for the grief that’s often hidden—shaped by trauma, shame, and the impact of systems like colonialism, racism, homophobia, ableism, and more.
In our work we will honor the deeper layers of pain, including intergenerational trauma and internalized oppression. Nothing is too heavy or too complex. If our grief comes from living in this world, then the world should help us move our grief - we’re not meant to carry it alone. In this space, all parts of you are welcome, and healing becomes possible—not by forgetting, but by witnessing.
Are our stories sometimes terribly painful, if they include our grief and heartaches? Yes, they absolutely are. But our grief and pain does not get to be pushed under the rug, it is valid and real and human and deserves to be witnessed. It gets to live amongst our hopes and dreams. Amongst our moments of awe and joy. It’s this breadth of human emotion that makes us human, that connects us, that reminds us we are worthy.
So let’s honor this humanity with space, with ritual, music, or art, or poetry—whatever moves you. Here you grant yourself permission to come as you are, as a tree holds value in the full bloom of spring and the dormancy of winter.
Narrative Therapy
Narrative therapy is an approach to identity exploration—one that honors our complex constellation of identities, often colored by the challenging intersections of marginalization and oppression.
Together we examine the masks you wear in your day to day life. The lines and scripts you’ve memorized, the roles you play, the stories you’ve been told and retell yourself of your place—or lack thereof—in society, culture, or family; these are the seams that we pick apart to better understand the patterns in your life and relationships, unraveling threads of shame and judgment as we go. We look closely at the messages you’ve received of who you should be, how you are supposed to act, and the way you are expected to show up in the world and fit into a predetermined box.
Our story is who we are, so our story should be profoundly nurturing to our mind, body, and heart and it should be ‘ours’. Yet we’re told over and over again what our story should be, how it should be told, and what should be kept invisible. Here you take back what is yours and you release those burdens and expectations that were never yours and never meant to be your legacy. You reweave a tapestry of your own design, choosing which traditions and colors to keep and which to reinvent or leave out altogether.
In this space we explore what authentic self expression looks like to you, and define values you hold that reorient you to yourself in the same way a compass points to true north. You decide how you want to be and move through this world. Here the meaning you make of your life is your own, even while you hold awareness and find balance between ‘me’ and ‘we.’
With insight and understanding comes new perspectives, a shift, a softening.
There’s feelings of spaciousness, of lightness and opening. The impacts, patterns, and protective cycles of trauma that you once felt impossibly stuck in—dissociation, numbness, PTSD, depression, anxiety, obsessive thoughts or compulsions/OCD, addiction—are relieved.
Burdens are released and fade away
Energy and joy are reclaimed
And you have yourself again
What I stand for…
As a Queer therapist and a person of this earth, I recognize the importance of—and hold a deep commitment to—cultivating safe, nonjudgmental, and affirming spaces. I work to support all my clients in reclaiming and writing their own stories. I have had the privilege of working with individuals from a wide range of ethnicities, complex identities, and lived experiences, including those who are neurodivergent, disabled, LGBTQIAP+, Asexual/Ace Spec, Poly, and Queer. My goal is to help facilitate healing from attachment wounds, PTSD, and complex trauma that deeply impacts our communities.
I welcome all people with respect and honor regardless of race, ethnicity, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, ability, religion, age, body size, or background. I am committed to anti-oppressive, anti-racist, and trauma-informed care.
I would also like to acknowledge that the land on which I live and practice is the traditional, ancestral, and unceded homelands of the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla peoples, as well as the Stl’pulmsh (Cowlitz), Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, and Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians. I offer deep respect to Indigenous peoples—past, present, and future—and recognize the enduring relationship between Indigenous communities and this land.
Contact Me
Feel free to reach out anytime if you have any questions about therapy or are interested in scheduling a consult. Even if you simply have questions about how therapy works, but aren’t ready to start now, we can set up a time to chat.
compassionateselfhealingtherapy@outlook.com
(360) 712-7754