Everything inside you is natural and important.
Yes. E v e r y t h i n g.
“To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients—care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.”
— bell hooks, all about love: new visions (2001)
The Seven Acts of Love
This work is about Love. Real, active verb, capital L, Love and Lovingness. The fierce warm soft love that celebrates your humanity even when you don’t remember how.
Especially when you don’t remember how.
There’s lots of stuff that could be said about this work, what it looks like, how it feels, and the psychotherapeutic lineages it knits together.
But boil it down, capture its essence - and this work is relearning, rediscovering, and redefining what it means to be loved.
This is a brief overview of these seven acts of love that I have found to be elemental to this work, and the choices we make to engage in it.
Recognition
For many of us, recognition, or attuned attention, is a missing experience. Or, if attuned attention was extended to us, that attention was twisted, armored, toxic with fear, or threatening to take in. When our needs come salted with pain, anger, resentment or overwhelm, it becomes another experience entirely. It becomes not love. It becomes obligation, burden, shame, neglect or abuse.
This work means experiencing loving attunement, which can be frightening or intense at times. That’s alright, that’s why we’re here.
No experience of love requires any experience of abuse.
Respect
You’re likely to experience a different kind of respect in this work. Not simply respect for your accomplishments or your effort; but an active and persistent interest in your preferences, a prioritization of your embodied consent, and an ongoing commitment to your boundaries and the dance that is the process of relating.
Many of us have never considered relating as a process or experienced heartfelt repair in our significant relationships. Therefore what’s possible in a relationship that contains respect remains a mystery.
In this work, you will experience what it is to have your wants, needs, and values mutually matter and be held as central to our work. You won’t have to earn it or make it happen.
No experience of love requires any experience of disrespect.
Trust
Trust is more than a choice we extend to each other. It’s an internal emotional experience that allows us access to layers of our vulnerability so that we may choose to share our fullest selves with others.
When enough trust is present in a relationship, the relationship itself becomes a secure container that the body implicitly understands how to lean into, though the mind or heart may have reasons of their own to resist this impulse.
Such vigilance speaks to past experiences when our trust was betrayed.
In this work, we’ll explicitly explore how your mind, body, and heart all decide, independently of each other, what your version of “enough” trust is.
We will not force any part of you to trust faster or more than you do.
No experience of love requires any experience of betrayal.
Genuineness
To be genuine, or authentic in a relationship of any kind is to be vulnerable, open, and honest.
You likely long to be in connection without feeling armored but may struggle to do so.
In this work, we see any armor that is present as there for a current and ongoing reason. It’s more than just a “strategy that no longer serves you” it’s a sign from the rest of you that a condition for vulnerability has not yet been sufficiently met.
There are a lot of “shoulds” that show up around this.
Should is a word that describes a condition that isn’t. Read that again.
Attempts to convince yourself that you “should” feel or be any way that you aren’t, is an attempt to re-contextualize your experience into something that it isn’t.
In this work, we’ll develop skills for open, honest, and loving communication with each other, and perhaps most importantly, with yourself.
No experience of love requires any experience of gaslighting.
Commitment
The most common commitment I see breaks my heart: the commitment to endure more pain, dirty pain, because maybe this time, it’ll work out.
Is it even a spoiler when we all know how this ends?
This work is committed to that which supports you, lifts you up, and broadcasts the shine that has always been there.
Which is absolutely not learning how to “tolerate” more/new pain.
Commitment also includes the agreements with self and with each other that map onto consent processes. If you’re not familiar with the Wheel of Consent, and you engage with other humans, please do the world a favor and get really skilled with this framework.
Being out of consent with yourself or another often results in some kind of trauma.
No experience of love requires any experience of perpetration.
Care
Care is the emotional and somatic experience evoked in us due to another’s experience or on behalf of another. It is rooted in compassion, empathy, and a sense of being present with the other person’s experience whatever that may be.
The most important thing I can tell you is that care is not, and does not require, understanding. Caring is the business of the heart and body. The mind need not be involved, in fact, it often mucks the whole business up.
Care says, “I do not need to understand your pain, for your pain to matter to me.” So explanations of your experience, while sometimes useful, are not necessary to receive care.
We often ask for care in indirect ways (we may not even know that’s what we’re asking for) and receive advice or suggestions for how to “fix” something in response - a heartbreaking result.
Care has been almost completely organized out of popular American culture to the point that it can feel strange, insufficient, or even threatening to receive it. In other cases, when care is what is needed, receiving the true exchange of emotional energy that happens when our vulnerability is allowed to impact another and that impact is shared in return, care closes a loop inside us. A completion that begins knitting the tiny threads of our hearts back together can begin.
No experience of love requires any experience of burden.
Affection
Like care, affection has been deeply and fundamentally compromised in our American culture.
Often seen as only appropriate to be offered to children, family members, or, lovers, affection is often laden with an unnecessary veneer of eros, that is as disturbing to contemplate as it is to feel.
Affection is an open-hearted moving toward another, for the primary purpose of expressing care and offering co-regulation.
Affection may or may not include physical touch.
Therapeutic touch in this work can meet this definition of affection though the scope of the relationship is different, the expression of care and co-regulation can be just as genuine.
Touch may be used in sessions to explore the unvoiced narrative that is passed between mind, body, and heart, to facilitate explorations designed to gather evidence for those narratives, and to address the missing experience of being held in our pain.
No experience of love requires any experience of violence.
FAQs
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Often, and when clients feel secure enough, clients position themselves with their eyes closed so they can better focus on their initial experience.
The “talking” that takes place is a speaking from present moment experience, rather than speaking about experience from the past or the future.
There are often many pauses or intentional silences to allow the client time to notice what is happening within them, to listen to themselves, and do their best to translate what they notice into language so that I can be right there with you in that experience as much as possible.
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I will apply for a Single Case Agreement for clients who have CareOregon/Oregon Health Plan (Medicaid) when I have the space and capacity to do so.
I do not have plans to become paneled with any other insurers at this time. -
While I do give priority to black and brown clients, my top requirement is a deep commitment to the change process and a bigger commitment to themselves.
I’m looking for people who respond to learning about my work with,
“Wow, that sounds terrible, no one in their right mind would want to go through all that. Hearing about what you do literally makes me nauseous with fear. When can I start?”If that’s you, you’re ready. Let’s do this.
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It sounds like, right now, you’re feeling confused or worried about doing it “wrong”, and you’d like more guidance so you get it “right”.
This is an example of an observation I might make to draw your attention to the present-moment experience that is happening.
There is no “supposed to” because there is no “right” or “wrong” way to experience any particular moment, and I certainly cannot tell you how to be yourself. There is only the practice of noticing what is true right now and speaking it aloud while it’s happening.
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Well, No one wants to feel unpleasant emotions, but in this work, you must be willing to. There is no getting to experience what lies on the other side of arrested emotional expression, without fully moving through the emotions.
Know that this time, it will be different. you will not be going through it alone, and you are not the person you were before.
With that said, this is depth psychotherapy. It’s a long-term commitment and a deep dive that aims to support the re-organization of your sense of self in the world. That means it’s no light thing. It can be advisable to engage in direct Trauma work, such as EMDR, to decrease the physical and emotional activation so that you are able to remain in your circle of capacity: a range where activation may be present but access to choice, preference, and self-love are present in some way.
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My work is designed for those who have experienced developmental or complex traumas, such as childhood neglect and abuse, and who did not have safe enough adults in their lives to help them through it. And because, as a person at my particular intersection of experience, I bring a great deal of focus and empathy to the contexts in which these traumas are contemporary, persistent, and ongoing aspects of your daily life.
If you want to break out of the programming of intergenerational trauma, feel a greater sense of self-trust, and discover the goodness that genuinely being yourself brings this work can help you.
Inherently attachment-focused, the work can be deeply relational, or more guiding, but make no mistake, it will never be “objective” because there’s no such thing.
If you want “objective”, what you may actually want is emotional distance, cognitive processing, and the avoidance of the murky depths. If that is the case, best of luck to you.
This is a service I will not provide.
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I received my Masters degree in clinical mental health counseling from Goddard College in Plainfield Vermont, where my focus was on Shamanic Psychotherapy and therapies that worked outside the white-male-dominated pedagogy with altered states of consciousness with an emphasis on facilitating ethical transformation.
I trained extensively with the now-shuttered Mindful Experiential Therapeutic Approaches, or M.E.T.A. LLC / Hakomi Institute of Oregon. Within this organization, my primary trainers were Jon Eisman, a founding member of the original Hakomi Method, Donna Roy, and Jessica Montgomery.
My particular expression of the Hakomi Method has been further impacted by both personal and professional experiences with Lorena Monda, Selin Strait, Nova Knutson, Anne-Marie Benjamin, Deah Baird, and Ron Kurtz himself, through his writing and the videos he left behind.
My expansions of the Hakomi Method are largely impacted by the work of Resmaa Menakem and his articulation of Somatic Abolitionism, the works of Bessel van der Kolk, Peter Lavine, and Deb Dana brought the somatic responses and processing of traumatic material, and Polyvagal Theory. Gabor Mate’s work on the physical manifestation of disease and its connection to emotional suppression has returned to me time and time again.