Approaches
The three trainings I lean on most, and what each one is actually for.
These aren’t separate rooms. In a session they braid together — and the line between them isn’t something you need to track.
Sensorimotor approach
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy works with the body’s habits directly — posture, breath, the micro-movements that happen before a thought finishes forming. It comes from Pat Ogden’s framework, refined over decades.
I reach for it specifically when:
- You’ve become chronically dissociated, and we need a careful, structured way back into the body
- You’ve been chronically braced, and we’re working with posture, breath, and small movement to let something soften
- We’re tracking attachment patterns that show up physically — the way the shoulders lift at a certain word, the way the gaze drops at a certain story
This approach carries more structure than the more open frame of dance/movement therapy. It has its own shape. I reach for the structure when the situation asks for it, and in other moments something more open serves better.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Level 1 · Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute
EFT approach
Emotion-Focused Therapy — Sue Johnson’s method — reads a couple’s trouble as an attachment story rather than a communication problem. Underneath the argument about the dishes is usually a much older question: are you there for me, can I reach you.
Most couples arrive having already done the talking part. They can name the loop. They can predict, almost word for word, how the next fight will go. Naming it hasn’t stopped it — because the loop doesn’t live in the words. It lives in two nervous systems reacting to each other faster than either person can think.
EFT gives me a way to slow that down and work with the bond itself. Alongside it I use PACT, Stan Tatkin’s psychobiological approach, and the somatic attention that runs through everything I do.
EFT Core Skills for Couples · PACT Level 1
Pre- and perinatal approach
This one isn’t about pregnancy.
The pre- and perinatal approach works with our earliest experiences — the ones that came before language, before memory as we usually mean it. What happened around conception, in the womb, at birth, and in the first months of life leaves an imprint. Not a story you can recall, but a shape.
That shape becomes the perception we carry about ourselves and about the world: whether we are welcome here, whether needs get met, whether other people are safe to reach toward. And it triggers automatic responses — the reaction that fires before you’ve decided anything, the one you’ve tried to talk yourself out of for years and that feels impossible to change.
It feels impossible because reasoning develops later. The pattern was laid down before words, so words alone don’t reach it. This work goes underneath them, at the pace your nervous system sets.
Most people who come to it are simply adults who keep running into the same automatic response and have never found the bottom of it.
Pre- and Perinatal Psychotherapy with Dr. Annie Brook · Perinatal Loss and Grief · Perinatal Mood and Anxiety Disorders · Perinatal Assessment, Diagnosis, and Treatment
How these fit together
These three sit underneath the two ways of working: individual sessions and couples sessions. You don’t choose an approach when you book — you bring what you’re carrying, and I draw on whichever of these the moment asks for.
Alongside them run the two things present in every session regardless: dance/movement therapy and somatic attention, from Naropa’s Somatic Counseling Psychology program. Those aren’t a fourth approach. They’re the ground the others stand on.
Not sure which of these is yours?
That’s the normal starting point, and it isn’t something you need to work out in advance. Bring what’s happening. Thirty minutes on a call is usually enough for both of us to get a sense of the fit.