In my practice of body-based therapy, I simply mean reintegrating the body into how we make sense of our thoughts, feelings, and lived experience. This looks different for each client. For some, it involves slowing down and bringing awareness to sensations, movement, posture, and breath while also exploring thoughts and emotions as they arise. For others, it includes more direct exploration and experimentation at the body level such as noticing what shifts when a movement is made larger or smaller, slower or faster, or when attention is brought to different areas of the body. I take a responsive, collaborative approach and follow each client’s process and capacity. When helpful or preferred, we can also begin with more structured somatic practices using breath, movement, or sensation-based exercises to strengthen interoceptive awareness and support nervous system regulation. Body Based therapy is an fundamental orientation I take with me in all of the modalities that I work from.

Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) is an attachment-based therapy approach that helps people understand emotional patterns, deepen connection, and create more secure relationships with themselves and others. EFT therapy can feel emotionally deep, vulnerable, and connecting, often helping clients access emotions and relational patterns that may have previously felt difficult to reach or express. Many clients experience a growing sense of clarity and ability to depend and soften into their emotional experiences, supporting more fulfilling and authentic connection to themselves, others and the world.

The client’s role is to explore their emotions, relational patterns, and underlying attachment needs with openness and curiosity as they arise in the therapeutic process.

The therapist helps slow clients down, deepen awareness of internal emotional experiences, track relational patterns and attachment cycles, reflect and summarize key themes, and guide clients toward identifying and expressing underlying emotions, needs, and longings in ways that support greater connection and emotional safety.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a therapy approach that understands the mind as made up of different parts or inner roles, like a protective part that worries, a critical part, or younger wounded parts, along with a core Self that is calm, curious, and grounded. Therapy helps people get to know these parts with compassion rather than judgment, understand what each part is trying to do or protect, and support internal healing and greater balance so the system can feel less conflicted and more connected.

Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) is a type of therapy most often used for OCD, anxiety and trauma. It helps people gradually face situations, thoughts, or images that trigger anxiety (the “exposure”), while learning to not do the usual compulsive or avoidance behaviors that temporarily relieve it (the “response prevention”). Over time, the nervous system learns that the anxiety can rise and fall on its own, and that feared outcomes are less likely or more tolerable than they feel in the moment, which reduces the power of the fear cycle. It focusses on supporting creating tolerance for uncertainty.

the client’s role is to actively and gradually engage with feared thoughts, situations, or sensations while resisting the urge to perform compulsions, avoidance behaviors, or safety rituals. Clients practice tolerating discomfort, noticing anxiety rise and fall without trying to neutralize it, and collaborating with the therapist to design exposures that are challenging but manageable, supporting new learning over time.

The therapist helps identify triggers, compulsions, avoidance strategies and safety behaviors. Then they guides client in designing a gradual exposure hierarchy that feels challenging but doable. The therapist supports the client in staying engaged during exposures, helps prevent avoidance or ritualizing, provides presence during the exposure, and reinforces new learning as the nervous system discovers it can tolerate distress without relying on compulsions.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a therapy that helps people process distressing memories by using dual awareness, holding attention on a difficult memory while also staying anchored in the present moment through guided bilateral stimulation (such as eye movements, tapping, or sounds). This back-and-forth attention supports the nervous system’s natural capacity to process and integrate experiences that may have felt overwhelming or “stuck,” allowing the memory to become less emotionally charged and more resolved over time.

The client’s role is to identify and bring attention to a specific target (such as a memory, image, belief, emotion, or body sensation), and then stay present with their internal experience as it unfolds during processing. Clients are also invited to notice what comes up, thoughts, feelings, sensations, or new associations, without trying to control or analyze it, and to report these shifts back to the therapist while maintaining dual awareness between the past experience and the present moment.

The therapist guides the overall process in a contained and paced way while maintaining a strong sense of safety and dual awareness. They help the client identify targets, clarify associated emotions, body sensations, and core beliefs, and develop a preferred adaptive belief. During processing, the therapist facilitates bilateral stimulation (such as eye movements, tapping, or tones), tracks the client’s responses, and helps keep them oriented and within a tolerable processing space.

Brain Spotting is a body-based processing approach that uses focused attention on a specific visual spot to support the nervous system in processing emotions, memories, and experiences that may be held beneath conscious awareness. Through mindful noticing of bodily sensations, emotions, and internal responses, the process allows the nervous system to move through and integrate what arises at its own pace.

The client’s role is to mindfully notice and stay connected to their internal experience as it unfolds, while the therapist’s role is to support attunement, help identify and hold the visual focus point, and create a grounded, relational space for the nervous system’s natural processing to occur.

A brainspot can be identified through the client noticing where activation or resonance feels strongest in their visual field, through reflexive cues such as eye wobbles/blinks or changes in the nervous system, or through the therapist guiding a focused search process based on the client’s internal experience.

Humanistic-Existential therapy is a relational and insight-oriented approach that explores meaning, authenticity, identity, and the tensions inherent in being human (freedom and responsibility, connection and isolation, meaning and meaninglessness, life and death, certainty and uncertainty, joy and suffering, and awe and trauma). This approach supports clients in deepening awareness of their lived experience, exploring existential “givens” and personal values, and developing a more intentional, authentic relationship with themselves, others, and the world around them.

The client’s role is to engage in honest exploration of their lived experience, including thoughts, emotions, values, and internal conflicts, while reflecting on meaning, choice, and responsibility in their life. Clients are invited to bring curiosity to tensions (and to notice how they relate to themselves, others and the world, with the goal of deepening authenticity, awareness, and intentional ways of being.

The therapist offers an attuned, authentic, and non-pathologizing relational presence that supports clients in exploring meaning, identity, and lived experience. They help create a space where existential themes can be safely examined and integrated. This often include deep listening, deepening questions, meaning-making prompts, staying with present-moment experience, gentle confrontation of patterns, highlighting contradictions or dialectics, and tracking emotional and bodily awareness.