At Cascade Psychotherapy, I work with clients to help them decrease their negative emotional responses in a comprehensive way. We don’t just work to challenge your thoughts, we also develop an understanding of emotional awareness, and how our body impacts our mind.

Learning about emotions seems simple, but we tend to overlook the intricacy of what we feel, and why. Many of my clients learn that their emotional responses run deeper. Understanding how past experiences with family, relationships, and trauma impact you today will uncover why you feel so anxious, hopeless, mad, or sad so frequently. We tend to label our emotions as “over the top” and “unnecessary” when we don’t accurately know where they originate from.

We also need to understand that fear of our emotions magnifies them. Learning to decrease or eliminate certain emotional responses requires a paradox approach. Validate it, reduce your fear of it, welcome the emotion in, apply skills to regulate its intensity, and over time notice that emotion response diminish or stop.

As for your body, it definitely Keeps the Score, as Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk has discovered. Together, we focus on assessing how effective you are at tuning in with your body, and helping you develop a keen practice of soothing emotional responses through somatic practices.