You can feel good. You just need some help.
IFS and EMDR therapy for anxiety, depression, trauma, and relationship issues in Seattle.
What’s in the way of feeling good?
Is it a world that’s on fire, the weight of depression, or the constant background hum of anxiety? Or maybe you feel burdened by the enduring impacts of trauma, or disconnected in your relationships.
And maybe you’ve felt these ways for so long that a part of you wonders if relief is even possible.
Whatever it is, I’m here to help.
Hi, I’m Matt
I help people get unstuck and unburdened, so they can live meaningful and fulfilling lives.
I’ll help you heal, make peace with your emotions, learn skills for living and communicating, build fulfilling relationships, and live life in a way that feels authentic.
And in the process, I’ll help you get in touch with a foundational sense of joy and well-being that remains stable, even in the face of the pain and suffering inherent to being human.
I specialize in anxiety, depression, trauma, and relationship issues.
I’ll help you move from...
- Feeling anxious, on edge, and exhausted, to feeling grounded, at ease, and safe in your life and relationships.
- Feeling depressed, hazy, and hopeless, to feeling alive, connected, and joyful.
- Feeling weighed down or held back by something that happened in the past, to finding healing, relief, and forward momentum.
- Feeling like relationships are hard, stressful, or constant sources of anxiety, to finding the connection, ease, and safety you’re looking for.
IFS, EMDR, and other specialties
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Despite the name, IFS isn’t about your family. It’s about the different voices, emotions, motivations, and needs within you that interact much like a family. And like any family, these different parts of you don’t always get along. For example, the part of you that shuts down in conflict might be at odds with the part that desperately wants connection. IFS is about helping each part of you feel seen and heard, which can lead to deep healing and lasting shifts in how you think, feel, and show up in your life.
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Some painful experiences never finish processing. We get stuck replaying them, feeling triggered by them, unable to move on, even when the event itself is long over. EMDR uses bilateral stimulation, often eye movements, to help your brain finally process what it couldn’t at the time, so those experiences can be laid to rest in the past. EMDR is an effective treatment for trauma, anxiety, depression, and relationship issues that are rooted in the past.
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The quality of the bond that did—or didn’t—develop between you and your caregivers as a child becomes the blueprint for all your adult relationships. This blueprint is called your attachment style. For those of us whose caregivers weren’t around, weren’t attuned, or were actively harmful, we may have never learned what it’s like to feel fully safe and comfortable in relationships.
Attachment-focused therapy can help heal these formative wounds, help develop a sense of solidity, confidence, and ease in the world, and help improve our capacity to build satisfying relationships.
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Social anxiety often goes deeper than shyness. It can leave us feeling exposed, self-critical, and disconnected throughout our everyday interactions. I help people understand where these patterns come from, get relief from their inner critic, and build genuine confidence and ease in connecting with others.
More often than not, at the root of social anxiety are anxious or avoidant attachment patterns, but may also relate to trauma, difficult life experiences, or simply being different than “the norm.”
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Leaving a toxic or abusive relationship is just the beginning. Self-doubt, shame, and hypervigilance can remain long after. I help people process trauma and rebuild trust in their own perceptions, so they can reclaim themselves and move on to build safe and fulfilling relationships.
Therapy with me is compassionate and nonjudgmental.
I’m not going to push you anywhere you’re not ready to go. I’m not going to convince you to believe anything that doesn’t feel true. I’m not going to force a positive spin on your pain and suffering.
Instead, I’m going to walk alongside you in your struggles and be genuinely curious about your experience of life.
And then I’ll prop you up, and together we’ll figure out how and where to take the next step, so you can take it at a pace that’s right for you.
Therapy with me is intentional
If you’ve been in therapy before and felt like you were going in circles, I can relate, and it’s a frustrating place to be.
The work I do is intentional, and my goal is for you to never have to wonder whether therapy with me is “working.” I’m responsive to what shows up in session, and I always have a sense of where we’re headed and why. We’ll start by getting to know each other and making sure you have the tools and support you need before we go deeper. From there, we’ll move into the work that brings about lasting change.
Most of my clients can feel this change happening. Not always in big dramatic ways, but in the quiet sense that something is shifting, session by session.
Getting started
Schedule a free consultation
Before we start working together, we’ll need to make sure I’m the right therapist for you. In our initial consult, we’ll discuss what’s bringing you into therapy and any questions you have for me. If working together feels right, we’ll schedule our first appointment.
We do the work
We’ll start our work together by figuring out what’s in the way of you feeling good, and how we want to move through it in therapy. I’ll make sure you have all the tools and resources you need so that therapy is safe and effective. And then we’ll move into the deeper work that brings about change.
Watch things change
Therapy takes as long as it takes, but that doesn’t mean you have to be done with therapy to reap the benefits. You’ll notice shifts big and small along the way, and an increased capacity to handle life and feel good.