Services

Types of Therapy Offered

  • Individual Counseling

  • Couples+ Counseling

  • Adlerian Family Therapy

  • Groups

Art Therapy

Somatic Therapy

Mindfulness Training

Ketamine Assisted Therapy

Chronic Illness Work

Talk Therapy

Healing through Creative Arts Therapies

Art therapy uses the right hemisphere of your brain, which is opposite from talking. Trauma is also located on the right side of the brain, which is why it’s sometimes impossible to talk about trauma. Many problems boil down to trauma responses, things you may not associate with “big T” trauma, such as stuttering and growing up with a parent with disordered eating.

Art has a way of bringing out surprising things that don’t always make logical sense until they’re brought forward and processed in the body and through using the left side of the brain second.

Somatic Processing

Like the title of the bestselling book The Body Keeps the Score (van der Kolk, 2014) suggests, the human body often somatizes– or takes into the body and stores – unresolved loss, anxiety, stress, fear, and other emotions. Research has found that heightened stress leads directly to inflammation, and those with unresolved issues often end up with chronic illness. This is why many people you know who have trauma histories also have immune disorders and chronic conditions like irritable bowel syndrome, migraines, chronic fatigue, or neck pain.

Somatic theory believes that the way to work it out of the body is through gentle, safe, small interventions using the body. Somatically trained therapists can create space and direction for clients to process mental illness using their body. This is another unconventional treatment method, although hundreds of years of humanity’s wisdom believed in ritual, dance, drumming and chanting, massage, pressure points and meridians and so on.

Psychedelic Journeying

For decades, the use of psychedelics has been outlawed in the United States. Throughout human history, however, certain natural or manmade compounds, have been used to attain altered states of consciousness. Typically, these states give someone access to a transcendental experience or higher self.

Science now has good evidence that treating severe and persistent mental illness with psychedelics is a viable option for achieving a lasting state of wellbeing that psychotropic medication and long term therapy have not been able to achieve. These substances include ketamine, MDMA (ecstasy), psilocybin (“magic”) mushrooms, LSD (“acid”), and ayahuasca. Interestingly, some of these are used in the treatment of dependence upon other substances, such as alcohol, and with opioid addiction.

There are now states, such as Oregon, that authorize psychedelic-assisted therapy that is overseen by a mental health practitioner. Having help preparing, educating, planning, coming down from, and integrating the experience of psychedelic therapy has many benefits. Creative arts & somatic therapies help to internalize and process the experience of an altered state of consciousness and a return to everyday life.

Consultation

We consult with people & organizations about:

  • Working with clients with chronic illness & acquired disabilities

  • Adlerian case conceptualization & treatment planning

  • Art therapy and/or the ethics of using art in therapy for non art-therapists

  • Somatic interventions for the treatment of trauma

  • Working with transgender kids and teens and their parents

  • Gender, LGBTQ+ issues, trans identities, pronouns, microaggressions, and competence