About
I trained as a talk therapist. The body kept changing my mind.
For years I sat with people who could tell me exactly what had happened to them. They had the language, the timeline, the insight. And they still couldn't sleep, still braced at a raised voice, still felt a long way from their own lives.
Understanding was doing everything it could. Whatever was holding them wasn't listening to it.
My story
I noticed it long before I had a word for it.
My first job out of college was in a ninth grade classroom in Washington, DC. You could see the Capitol from the window, and yet, there weren't enough desks for the students.
They were called disruptive, checked out, difficult to reach. What I saw were young people whose bodies had been running on high alert for years, in a situation that demanded that they sit still and concentrate. They weren't failing to learn. They were surviving, and survival takes everything you have.
In the years that followed, I worked in prisons, hospital programs, and community mental health, and the pattern held everywhere I went. The nervous system had made its adjustments long before anyone arrived in my office, and it wasn't going to unmake them because we'd talked it through.
Eventually I went looking for something that worked below the conversation. That search led me to Transforming Touch, developed by Stephen Terrell for people whose difficulties began early, before memory and before language, in the years when the nervous system was still being built.
What Transforming Touch actually is.
You lie clothed on a table, or sit if that suits you better, and a practitioner makes gentle contact at specific points on the body. There is no pressure, nothing you need to describe or relive.
What it offers is something the nervous system may not have received enough of the first time around: steady, predictable, unhurried contact. A system that learned early to stay ready for the next thing gets repeated evidence that it doesn't have to.
This is why it reaches what talking often can't. It isn't asking you to understand anything. It's working with the system that has been holding the pattern, in the language that system actually uses.
It became my primary approach, and most of what I do now is built around it.It became my primary approach, and most of what I do now is built around it. Touch is never a requirement, though. Some people work with me for a long time before it enters the picture, and some never use it at all.
Training
Where the work comes from.
Licensure
- Licensed Clinical Social Worker, New Jersey
Transforming Touch certification
- Approved Personal Session Provider
- Approved Case Consultation Provider
Talk therapy training
- CBT
- CBT-ED and CBT-AR
- DBT
- Motivational Interviewing
- Prolonged Exposure Therapy
Somatic training
- Transforming Touch® Practitioner
- Somatic Experiencing Practitioner
- Brainspotting
- Somatic Resilience and Regulation
- Embodied Recovery for Eating Disorders
- Safe and Sound Protocol
- Rest and Restore Protocol
- Focus System
- Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction
- Yoga and Qigong
In session
What it's like to work with me.
I'm direct.
I'll tell you what I'm seeing and why I'm suggesting something. I'd rather you disagree with me than go along with it.
There's no protocol.
Some people need mostly touch work. Others need to talk first and perhaps add touch in later. Some progress quickly while others need to go slowly for a long time before anything else is possible. My job is to partner with you to figure out your needs and adapt our sessions to them.
You're meant to graduate.
What we're working with took years to build, so this isn't brief. Some people find real relief in a few months, and for others it takes longer. Either way, we're working toward you needing this less..
Get in touch
Start with a free 15 minute call. If I'm not the right fit, I'll help you find someone who is.