heal insecure attachment, release yourself from trauma, and navigate life and love with confidence.
my practice is currently full so I am not accepting new patients at this time :) thank you for understanding!
MEET DR. CLARK
My mission is to help women accomplish true healing and overcome the challenges they face in their daily lives. Whether you struggle with stress and anxiety, have low self-esteem, or can’t find success in dating or relationships, I’m here to help.
Modern women deserve modern solutions, and I believe that mental wellness is best achieved through mind-body integrative practices.Through a combination of emotionally-focused attachment therapy and neuropsychology (Somatic Experiencing and EMDR), I will help you gain mastery over your emotions, increase self-confidence, and cultivate secure, healthy relationships.
VIRTUAL THERAPY
Virtual therapy, also known as online therapy or teletherapy, is a convenient and effective way to receive mental health support from the comfort of your own home. Learn more about Virtual Therapy.
SERVICES OFFERED
Working with me, you will receive a tailored combination of the evidence-based therapies listed below.
-
Find out what your Attachment Style is: Take the quiz!
Our style of attachment affects everything from the way we interpret a text message to the partners we choose (and how those relationships play out). Understanding our attachment style-- Secure, Anxious, Avoidant, or Disorganized-- can help us recognize our strengths and vulnerabilities in life. If your attachment style is insecure, I can help you identify your triggers, tame your defensive attachment strategies (like giving the silent treatment to your friend, over-texting your crush, blowing up at your parent, etc.), befriend your emotions, communicate your relationship needs and boundaries, and feel confident overall.
What is it and who is it for?
The goal of attachment-based therapy is to help you develop a secure attachment style, which is characterized by a solid sense of self and high self-esteem, ability to regulate and communicate feelings, trust in self and others, and highly balanced, cooperative, and satisfied relationships.
This therapy might be for you if you experience any of the following signs of insecure attachment:
Low self-esteem
Strong fear of rejection
Avoidance of commitment
Difficulty being vulnerable
Codependency
Jealousy and preoccupation
Struggle to communicate boundaries and needs
Finding yourself in the same hot-and-cold or "toxic" relationship over and over
-
What is it and who is it for?
Have you ever felt like you experience a surge of stress, fear, anxiety, or dread in situations that are relatively benign? Like getting an email from your boss, being in a crowded place, or not hearing back from your partner in a timely manner? If so, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) might be right for you.
EMDR is a therapy meant to alleviate symptoms of trauma, which can range from the examples above to major events, like surviving war or abuse. The purpose of EMDR is to help reduce the amount of distress you feel in the present by accessing and healing a related memory from the past. For example, you might come to therapy hoping to reduce the amount of fear and worry you experience when your partner hasn’t text you back for hours, which has led you to believe you aren’t a priority. Through EMDR assessment, we may discover that this feeling of abandonment is related to lack of attention that was given to you in childhood. From there, we would use lateral eye-movement to stimulate and neutralize the negative feelings and beliefs that developed in the past (i.e., “I’m not a priority”), defuse those same feelings in the present, and strengthen more adaptive beliefs (i.e., “I am worthy of love”). I like to think of it as transforming a colorful, cacophonous movie with surround-sound into a black and white page in a history book. Or like taking all the disorganized files and folders on your desktop and moving it to the trash bin, leaving it simplified and organized. After EMDR, you should feel less triggered and a greater sense of mastery over your emotional responses.
-
I have significant education and training in Attachment Theory and Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFT), which both aim to identify how early relational experiences and traumas contribute to an individual's sense of security (or insecurity) in the world. If my early experiences with a caregiver told me that safe connection is inconsistent, unreliable/untrustworthy, or even impossible, it is likely that I will approach all relationships with that unconscious assumption. Through relationship coaching, I help individuals identify the early experiences that inform their current "attachment style" and the associated relational patterns that prevent them from achieving secure romantic connection. I then teach new ways of showing up in the world with confidence and direct communication of feelings, boundaries, and needs.
What is it and who is it for?
Emotionally Focused Therapy is an attachment-based approach to individual therapy that offers an integration of humanistic experiential interventions (focused on reshaping intrapsychic experience) and systemic interventions (focused on reshaping patterns of engagement with significant others). Emotion is given precedence across treatment modalities given its powerful role in structuring both inner experience and key interactional patterns in relationships. EFTs believe that emotion links and organizes core experience and interaction.
The goals of EFT are:
To offer corrective experiences that positively impact perceptions of self and other and shape stable, lasting change.
To offer transformative moments where vulnerability is encountered with openness, confidence, and acceptance.
To enable clients to achieve secure attachment, which is characterized by personal (emotional) and relational accessibility/openness, responsiveness, and engagement.
To enable clients to shape a coherent sense of self that can deal with existential life issues and become a fully alive human being.
-
I am passionate about the connection between mind and body, believing that mental and emotional problems are inextricably intertwined. Physical problems influence your emotions (i.e., chronic pain leads to depression) and emotional problems manifest physically (i.e., "my sadness feels like a ton of bricks on my chest"). Therefore, I incorporate relaxation techniques into my work, including mindfulness, meditation, controlled breathing, and progressive muscle relaxation to target both the physical and emotional manifestations of pain.
What is it and who is it for?
Unlike standard mental health therapy, such as CBT (which focuses prominently on the mind), somatic therapy incorporates body-oriented modalities such as mindfulness, breathwork, and meditation to support mental healing. Somatic experiencing therapy sessions include talk therapy and mind-body exercises.
Somatic therapy emphasizes bottom-up processing instead of top-down processing. Top-down processing is the use of external, pre-existing, or "big picture" information to interpret sensory experience. It involves focusing on the whole picture to understand the individual parts (your perception/construct drives interpretation). For example: I shut down because I am socially awkward. This can sometimes lead to limiting beliefs about the self and inaction to resolve present distress.
Bottom-up processing involves focusing on each individual part of the experience to understand the whole picture (internal, physical, and sensational aspects drive interpretation). For example: in social situations I notice my increased heart rate, sweaty palms, shortness of breath, and cognitive dissociation. This tells me that I am feeling anxious and I need to take a deep breath. This process can lead to greater self-awareness and agency to resolve the issue.
If you are looking to expand your therapy experience beyond just talk therapy, want to get more in touch with your emotions, and want to learn how to use your body's organic intelligence to heal: somatic therapy is for you.
if you're ready to take the first step towards healing and growth, I’m here to support you.
FIRST STEP
schedule your initial consultation directly on my calendar by clicking the “Request Appointment” button below.
my practice is currently full so I am not accepting new patients at this time :) thank you for understanding!
if you would like to tell me a little bit more about you before scheduling your consultation, you can scroll down to the contact form below.
GET STARTED
my practice is currently full so I am not accepting new patients at this time. thank you for understanding!