About
Deep listening will be the foundation for our work in therapy.
Listening to you - to your story, to your wishes, to your pain, to your dreams, and to your struggles - is the foundation of my approach. I will collaborate with you to discover the best way I can help you.
Conditions and problems I have succesfully treated include: mood disorders (depression, anxiety, panic and unstable mood); problems in relationships with peers, partners, parents and children; personality disorders; trauma; abuse; addictions; grief and loss; difficulty functioning at work and school.
Welcome to Healing with Gwen, the place to land if you’re looking for deep healing and transformation. What are the wounds that you’re carrying? What do your parts need to communicate to you so you can listen and attend to them? What’s holding you back, and are you ready to move into the dark unknown places with light and loving attention? Self compassion is the foundation of my practice.
You may be feeling burned out in life with the heaviness of what you’re carrying, feel disconnected from yourself or dissociated. You may have tried talk therapy such as CBT and found that it hasn’t penetrated the core wounds that lead to thoughts and beliefs that result in cycles of pain and self-sabotaging behaviors. With compassion and appreciation for all of your parts and what you have gone through, we will look beneath the surface.
If you are interested in and willing to tune into your body, you will find that it carries messages for you about what emotions need attention. Emotions are messengers crying out for understanding, love and acceptance. That understanding, love and acceptance, directed even to the parts of yourself you might be most afraid of, is what has the power to transform and heal you.
You might feel ashamed of asking for help, assuming and telling yourself that your problems don’t matter, you should have gotten over the past by now, and there is something wrong with you for feeling the way you do. Maybe important people in your life have told you that you hold onto things you should let go of, or that you’re too sensitive, take things too personally, should think more positively. Would you like to be welcomed into a space where you can finally receive the message that your feelings and reactions aren’t your fault? That you are and have been responding in a completely valid way to what you’ve been through? You don’t need to compare yourself to people who have been through “something worse”. You deserve to feel safe in your body, to treat yourself with love and compassion, and to value yourself and your emotions. You are valid, you are ok, and there is nothing wrong with you. If you have been struggling with reaching out due to shame and fears of being judged, criticized, or invalidated, you have come to the right place.
We’ll start with creating a safe space for you and developing a therapeutic relationship. This can take time, especially if you have felt hurt expressing your vulnerability, shamed for your emotions, struggle to feel safe in your body and with others, fear you may get attached too quickly, or find yourself keeping a guard up. All of that is completely okay. We’ll take as long as we need to establish safety in our relationship. When you’re ready, we’ll begin using Schema Therapy tools to understand how trauma has shaped your beliefs about yourself, others, and life, and how you shift from one mode to the next in ways you might not understand. We’ll use EMDR to process those traumas and weave in reparenting and visualization to change how you feel about yourself and what you’ve been through. You’ll emerge with a fundamental sense of okay-ness, a landing place from which you can take flight physically, emotionally and spiritually. Yes, I welcome spirituality and faith into our work together, and I’ll help you heal from negative religious messages and spiritual abuse. We can talk or not talk about God, the divinity of the universe, and following your inner knowing.
