Amy believes people are inherently capable of healing — not because they need to be fixed, but because most of what brings someone into therapy is a response that made sense at some point, even when it no longer serves them. Her work is about helping clients understand those responses, build new skills for navigating them, and reconnect with parts of themselves that may have gotten pushed aside along the way.

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Amy starts with a strong foundation. Before any technique matters, the relationship does. She takes the time to understand each client's story, goals, and what "better" actually looks like for them — not a generic version of it. That relationship is what makes the harder work possible later.

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Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is often where Amy begins with clients. CBT is built on a simple but powerful idea: our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are all connected, and shifting one can shift the others. It gives client and therapist a shared language early on for noticing patterns and building practical tools clients can use right away — inside sessions and out.

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EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is one of the most well-researched approaches for trauma, and Amy uses it with clients for whom talk therapy alone isn't fully addressing what's underneath. EMDR helps the brain reprocess distressing experiences and memories that have gotten "stuck," reducing their emotional charge so they no longer drive reactions in the present. It's not about reliving the event — it's about helping the nervous system finally file it away as something that happened, rather than something that's still happening.

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Internal Family Systems (IFS) shapes how Amy thinks about trauma and inner conflict more broadly. IFS holds that we all carry different "parts" of ourselves — protective parts, wounded parts, parts that show up in ways that don't always make sense from the outside. Rather than trying to eliminate these parts, Amy and her clients get curious about what they're protecting and what they need. This tends to reduce the shame that often comes with self-criticism or feeling "stuck," and it works especially well alongside EMDR and nervous-system-informed care.

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Amy also works from a nervous-system-informed lens. Trauma isn't only about singular, dramatic events — it can also be the accumulated weight of chronic stress, unmet needs, or environments that kept the body on high alert for too long. Understanding how the nervous system responds to stress — and learning to work with it rather than against it — is often where lasting change actually takes hold.

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Together, these approaches let therapy move at a pace that fits each client: building skills first, addressing root causes when they're ready, and helping clients leave therapy not just feeling better, but genuinely equipped.

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