Stoneybrook Behavior Health, PLLC

Experience and trauma-informed care shifts the focus from “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?” or "What's hard about this situation?"  Healing-centered engagement explores the question "What's right with you?"

Experience/trauma-informed and healing-centered approaches actively recognize the impact chronic stress, failures of attunement, interpersonal conflict, societal pressures, and traumatic events can have on our identity, health, beliefs, thoughts, emotions and behavior. Experiences that feel emotionally and/or physically unsafe or invalidating, especially early ones, shape the way our autonomic nervous system responds to perceived threats in the world.  Unpleasant memories are stored within distinct neural networks in the brain and manifest as automatic physiological sensations, thoughts and behavioral reactions when those networks are activated.  This is why humans can react very quickly to simple environmental cues such as a change in voice tone, facial expression, smell, etc.  Therapeutic practices that engage our bodies, minds and social engagement system help us differentiate and integrate these neural networks to achieve healing within the psyche.  Skills and behavior-based approaches can help us ground ourselves in the present, regulate our bodies, clarify our values and needs, communicate hopes and concerns, establish boundaries, and cultivate environments and relationships that help us maintain gains and feel more of how we want to feel. 

Experiential therapies can be helpful for people who have a tendency to: 

• Intellectualize emotional experiences rather than feeling them 

• Avoid situations and experiences that could activate a vulnerable feeling state or difficult memory

• Engage in perfectionism or controlling/compulsive behavior in an attempt to feel a sense of control or create predictability and stability 

• Become consumed in productivity, work, or achievements

• Exhibit co-dependence or "rescuing" of people or animals, as a surrogate for feeling able to rescue a vulnerable part of themselves 

• Throw "temper tantrums"/exhibit emotional dysregulation

• Engage in excessive drug or alcohol use, binging and purging eating patterns or anorexia, risky sexual behaviors or impulsivity

• Experience repetitive, distressing intrusive thoughts or images. 

I utilize offer decades of experience and investment in specialized training and clinical consultation to offer my clients the benefits of proven practices, which I aim to combine with collaborative treatment planning and a warm, supportive approach.  Through the use of evidence-based, outcomes-driven approaches including Eye Movement and Desensitization & Reprocessing (EMDR), Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), Internal Family Systems (IFS), Exposure & Response Prevention (ERP), Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) and Family Systems Therapy, I work to help my clients leave sessions with not just and awareness of why they feel or behave in certain ways, but with a new, felt sense of safety, worth, and competence, along with the tools, skills and confidence to notice and feel emotions, step into experiences that may feel challenging, solve immediate problems, prevent conflict, address future concerns and feel more of the way they want to feel.  

I am EMDR Certified through EMDRIA, Level I trained in IFS through the IFS Institute Cambridge Health Alliance, CBT trained through the Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Engage in regular trainings through IOCD and am CPS trained (and formerly certified) through Think Kids at Massachusetts General Brigham Hospital.  

Affiliations:  

IOCD (International Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Foundation) 

ISSTD (International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation) Active and Participating Member 

EMDRIA (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing International Association) - Certified

IFS Institute (Internal Family Systems Institute at Cambridge Health Alliance) - Level I trained. 

CPS (Collaborative problem-solving through Think Kids at Massachusetts General Brigham Hospital Psychiatric Department

 802-441-6343         info@stoneybrookbehaviorhealth.com         We respect your privacy