You can feel good. You just need some help.
IFS and EMDR therapy for anxiety, depression, trauma, and relationship issues in person in Seattle and online.
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, build fulfilling relationships, and live life authentically.
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.
Heal from the past and move through the present.
Therapy with me focuses on addressing the impacts of difficult past and present experiences that leave you feeling exhausted, disconnected, or weighed down in your day-to-day life. Experiences such as:
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- Abuse
- Emotional neglect, abandonment, or chronic unmet needs
- Challenging family dynamics
- Always having felt different or “other”
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- Single event trauma
- Domestic or intimate partner violence
- Sexual trauma
- Narcissistic abuse
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- Repeated invalidation, microaggressions, and harm caused by systems of oppression.
- Chronic stress and anxiety from living within a hyper-individualist capitalist culture
- Loss of shared ritual, community, or intergenerational connection
- Growing up in spaces not designed for your body, pace, or way of being
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- Breakups and divorce
- Toxic or abusive relationships
- Interpersonal trauma
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- Loss and grief
- Major life changes and transitions
- Climate and political anxiety
- Difficulties in relationships, work, school, or life in general
And find deep relief from your symptoms.
I’ll teach you skills for coping and managing symptoms so you can function in your day-to-day life, but we’ll focus our work on resolving symptoms at their roots so you don’t have to cope forever. Common symptoms I help people with include:
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- Difficulties with emotions
- Anxiety and hypervigilance
- Constantly feeling on edge or in danger
- Visual or emotional flashbacks
- Nightmares
- Persistent feelings of shame, guilt, or being broken
- Numbness or flatness
- Disconnection from the body
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- Generalized anxiety
- Performance, academic, or work anxiety
- Social anxiety
- Relationship anxiety (eg, fear of abandonment)
- Existential anxiety
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- Loss of joy and interest in things
- Deep emotional exhaustion
- Loneliness and isolation
- Persistent feelings of sadness, emptiness, or flatness
- Feeling worthless, like a burden, or like you’re somehow failing at life
- Difficulty imagining a positive future
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- Codependency
- Difficulty identifying wants and needs
- Difficulties with communication and boundaries
- Difficulty being emotionally vulnerable in ways that are safe and foster deep connection
- Constantly feeling unsafe around people
- Constantly feeling alone, no matter who you’re with
- Difficulty trusting people, or feeling people are inherently unreliable or untrustworthy
- A deep desire for connection, but also a deep fear of it
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- Difficulty knowing who you are and what you need
- Difficulty finding meaning, purpose, and direction
- Feeling unlovable or worthless
- Persistent negative self-image and esteem
- Chronic fear of judgment and evaluation
- Perfectionism and unrealistic self-standards
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 structured and 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 never to 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 going deeper. From there, I’ll guide you through experiences designed to help you heal, grow, and find relief.
The people I work with often feel this change happening—not always in big, obvious ways, but in a subtler sense that something is shifting, session to session.
IFS, EMDR, and other specialties...
Alongside anxiety, depression, trauma, and relationship issues, I also specialize in:
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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 to speak for your needs. 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 is long over. EMDR uses bilateral stimulation, often eye movements, to help your brain finish processing what it couldn’t at the time, so the 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 is typically more than shyness. It can leave us feeling exposed, self-critical, and disconnected throughout our everyday interactions. More often than not, the roots of social anxiety relate to anxious or avoidant attachment patterns, but they may also relate to trauma, difficult life experiences, or simply being different than “the norm.”
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.
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Leaving a toxic or abusive relationship is just the beginning. Self-doubt, shame, and hypervigilance can linger long after. I help people process the trauma and rebuild trust in their own perceptions, so they can reclaim themselves and move on to build safe and fulfilling relationships.
Getting started
Schedule a free consultation
Before 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 to 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.
Things start to 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.