My approach

Modalities & Frameworks

Six ways of looking at the same life, so that no single story has to carry all the weight.

A note before the list

Think of each one as a lens

Something I often tell clients: it helps to imagine each modality as a different lens for understanding our experience. No single lens shows everything. But the more of them we can hold up to a problem, the more chances we have to actually understand it, and the more possible paths toward something better come into view.

I don't apply these in a fixed order or run you through a protocol. We reach for whichever lens brings your situation into focus, and we change lenses when a different angle would serve you better. What follows is where each one comes from, how it tends to show up in our work, and what you might notice as we use it.

01
The parts lens

Internal Family Systems (IFS)

Every part of you is welcome here, even the ones you've been told are too much.

Where it comes from

IFS was developed in the early 1980s by family therapist Richard Schwartz. Listening closely to his clients, he kept hearing them describe an inner world made of distinct "parts" that argued, protected, and carried pain, much like members of a family. Rather than treating that as just a figure of speech, he built a whole model around it, bringing the tools of family therapy inward and treating the psyche as naturally many-sided rather than a single unified self.

In our work together

We get curious about the parts of you in conflict, the inner critic, the part that shuts down, the part that keeps you safe by keeping you busy, and we build a relationship with each one instead of trying to silence it. The goal isn't to defeat any part of yourself. It's to lead from a calmer, steadier center that IFS calls the Self, so the protective parts can finally relax a little.

What you might notice

Less internal warfare. The harsh self-talk softens as you understand what it was trying to protect. People often describe feeling more whole, less at the mercy of any one reaction, and more able to respond to hard moments with curiosity rather than shame.

02
The political lens

Liberation Psychology

Your pain is not just personal. Often it is a reasonable response to unreasonable conditions.

Where it comes from

Liberation psychology took shape in Latin America in the 1970s and 80s, most associated with Ignacio Martín-Baró, a social psychologist and Jesuit priest working in El Salvador during its civil war. He argued that mainstream psychology too often treated suffering as a private defect while ignoring the poverty, violence, and oppression producing it. He was assassinated in 1989 for that work; the framework he helped articulate has carried on across the globe.

In our work together

We name the systemic forces in the room, racism, colonialism, cis-heteronormativity, ableism, poverty, rather than locating every problem inside you. That naming is itself part of the work; it relieves the private burden of believing you are simply broken, and it can reconnect personal healing to collective care and community.

What you might notice

A loosening of self-blame. Clarity about what is yours to carry and what was handed to you by an unjust situation. Many people find a steadier sense of agency, and a renewed sense that they are not alone in what they're facing.

03
The power lens

Feminist Theory

The personal is political, and so is the relationship between us.

Where it comes from

Feminist therapy grew directly out of the women's movement of the 1960s and 70s. It wasn't founded by any one person; it emerged from consciousness-raising groups and grassroots organizing, where women began noticing that much of their private distress traced back to shared conditions of inequality. Out of that came a therapy built on egalitarian relationships, shared power, and taking lived experience seriously as a source of knowledge.

In our work together

I work to keep our relationship as non-hierarchical as a therapy relationship honestly can be. We pay attention to how power, gender, and social expectation shape what you've been allowed to feel and ask for. I'm transparent about what I'm doing and why, and your read on your own life is treated as expertise, not raw material for me to interpret.

What you might notice

Less pressure to perform or shrink. A sense that you're a collaborator here rather than a patient being worked on. People often reclaim feelings, especially anger, that they'd been taught to suppress, and start trusting their own perceptions again.

04
The cultural lens

Multicultural Counseling

You arrive with a whole world behind you, language, ancestry, spirit, community, and all of it belongs in the room.

Where it comes from

Multicultural counseling emerged from the civil rights era and gained formal footing through the 1980s and 90s, as therapists and scholars challenged a field whose "neutral" standards were quietly built around white, Western, middle-class norms. It is sometimes called the "fourth force" in psychology, alongside the psychodynamic, behavioral, and humanistic traditions, and it insists that culture is central to care, not an add-on.

In our work together

We treat your cultural and spiritual context as part of the healing, not background noise. That might mean weaving in cultural or spiritual practices that matter to you, attending to the specifics of your community and lineage, and staying alert to the ways generic, one-size-fits-all approaches can quietly erase people. I hold my own location and assumptions up to the light rather than pretending I don't have any.

What you might notice

Feeling met as a whole person instead of having to translate or leave parts of yourself at the door. Therapy that fits your actual life rather than asking your life to fit the therapy.

05
The safety lens

Trauma-Informed Care

The question is not "what's wrong with you," but "what happened to you," and what helped you survive it.

Where it comes from

Trauma-informed care grew out of decades of trauma research and survivor advocacy, taking clearer shape through the 1990s and 2000s as studies on adverse experiences showed how deeply early and ongoing harm shapes the nervous system. It was later organized into a widely-used framework built around a few principles: safety, trustworthiness, choice, collaboration, and empowerment, designed so that care doesn't accidentally re-create the dynamics of the original harm.

In our work together

We move at the pace your nervous system can actually tolerate, no forced re-living of the worst moments to prove something happened. You stay in control of what we approach and when. I keep nervous-system responses in view, treating things like shutdown, hypervigilance, or panic as protective adaptations rather than symptoms to suppress. Safety planning here deliberately avoids police-based crisis responses wherever it can be done safely.

What you might notice

More room to breathe. A growing sense of safety in your own body. Reactions that once felt random or shameful start to make sense as understandable responses to what you lived through, which is often where real relief begins.

06
The neurodivergent lens

Neurodiversity-Affirming Practice

Your brain isn't a broken version of someone else's. It's its own working design.

Where it comes from

The idea of neurodiversity emerged in the late 1990s out of autistic online communities and self-advocates, who proposed that neurological differences like autism and ADHD are natural variations in human wiring rather than defects to be cured, much as biodiversity is natural in an ecosystem. The most-cited early articulation is sociologist Judy Singer's 1998 thesis, though the concept was genuinely a collective creation of the autistic community, and it remains rooted in self-advocacy.

In our work together

We build tools around how your brain actually works instead of trying to force it into a neurotypical mold. That means no deficit framing and no pressure to "pass" as something you're not. I offer flexible ways of communicating, video, audio-only, or text-based sessions, and we treat traits like stimming, deep focus, or different social rhythms as features to work with, not problems to fix.

What you might notice

Strategies that finally stick because they were built for you. Less exhaustion from masking. Often a real shift in self-understanding, from "why can't I just be normal" toward genuine respect for how your own mind operates.

Putting it together

More lenses, more paths forward

In practice these rarely show up one at a time. A single session might move between the parts lens and the political lens, or hold the cultural and neurodivergent lenses together at once. You don't need to know any of these names to benefit from them, that's my job. If you're curious how a particular lens might fit what you're carrying, we can talk it through.

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