our work together.
click a letter to open it
To my perfectionists:
Deep down, you’re always a little bit scared you’re unloveable, perpetually afraid of doing something wrong.
You find yourself striving to prove yourself, to do the right thing, to never mess up, to do it all, because failing means you’re the worst person everTM.
The critic on your shoulder speaks ‘should’s’ into your ear, telling you about all the things you should be doing, how you should be acting, comparing yourself endlessly to others. Your perfectionist on the other shoulder, making sure you get everything right, hoping to stave off the criticism by proving your enoughness. But if (when) you fall outside of the lines of perfect, the self-hatred and shame consumes, the fear of your unworthiness confirmed.
Sometimes the ‘should’s’ sound a lot like your values, and while you know perfection is impossible, getting comfortable with failure and mess doesn’t feel like an option - like you’re just supposed to be OK with causing harm.
While you know that shame and harshness doesn’t help anyone transform, while you dream of a world that doesn’t use punishment as a strategy, knowing doesn’t do anything to help your critic soften. The best strategy you’ve got is trying to ignore the harshness and soothe the shame when it flares.
My invitation for you:
You are inherently good, even though sometimes it feels like you’re a monster & people just haven’t found out yet.
Our inner critics are often our most loving parts, holding our values & goals at the center, but they picked up the tools of harshness and punishment because that is all we see modeled in the world. It is our work to hold our critics with love, helping them to transform and cultivating the internal safety to risk & fail & repair.
I am here to help your critic transform so it bigs you up rather than puts you down.
I help you meet your critic with curiosity: to learn how they are trying to help you (because all parts of you - even the harsh ones - are doing their thing for a reason.) Often, our critics are desperate to keep us safe - terrified of judgment and rejection if we don’t live up to the our standards & values - they want it so badly they’re screaming at us.
When we can understand that good intention, the whole room shifts. They transform from your biggest bully to someone who wants the best for you & just never learned how to let you know.
I want more for you AND your critic. You deserve to feel safe in failure, and your critic deserves to have its true intent to be heard. Our work becomes about building new ways for your critic to communicate with you, unlocking its wisdom and allowing it to soften in its strategies.
Imagine… your critic as your biggest cheerleader & you - able to hold yourself through the shame of making a mistake.
the other letters
To my caregivers:
Your tender heart & sensitivity is such a gift, but sometimes it feels like a burden.
With your ability to attune & pick up on the needs of others, it has always felt normal to step into helping & listening, even regulating & soothing. Taking care of others was the way you learned to calm down the room & keep yourself safe.
But somewhere along the way, attunement turned into hypervigilance, caregiving into people pleasing, and you got lost in the mix.
You never learned how to take up space, ask for help, rest, prioritize your own needs too. “Selfish” feels like a dirty word and disappointing others feels like death. “Boundaries” sound nice in theory, but in practice leaves you full of guilt and shame, not resourced - so what’s the point of trying.
You end up in cycles of burnout and self-abandonment, not knowing your needs, much less able to tend to them. Your natural care for others has become a thing you’re fighting with, for fear of the depletion it leads you to.
But what’s the middle ground between centering yourself without regard & saying yes when you really want to say no? When hyper individualism, ‘turn off the news to protect your peace’, and boundaries-as-cutting-people-off doesn’t feel like the answer?
My invitation for you:
Your attunement to others, sensitive hearts, and big emotions are powerful and necessary gifts in this world that leads with harshness and domination.
It is our work to steward these gifts: caring for ourselves too, learning safety in rest and accepting help, so we are in a reciprocal flow of giving and receiving with our selves, our loved ones, and the world.
I’m here to pour care onto you, and help you build new trails for your energy to flow in & out with ease and trust.
Let’s love up on the parts that try do it all, who learned that being helpful was the best way to feel valuable. And then let’s get to know the quiet side of this pattern: the parts of you that learned to pull back and stay quiet - fearful of being selfish, a nuisance, ‘too much’.
Those parts learned to silence you for a reason, and underneath the caregiving lives all the moments that it didn’t feel safe, all the times you learned that staying small and quiet was the better choice.
When we connect with those moments, I can help your young parts (who still fear they’re unloveable) feel loved by you.
And when YOU love you, self-abandoning gets a lot harder. Rejection still stings, but external relationships are no longer the only source of validation (and you might even begin to feel whatever ‘secure attachment’ feels like).
Imagine… you, confident in the vibration of your no as well as your yes, in reciprocal relationship with care so your tender heart is free to both flow & restore.
the other letters
To my — :
While you know conflict is natural, and difference holds possibility, your body hasn't caught up. As soon as tensions rise, your body responds like your safety is literally on the line - rejection inevitable.
You go into protection mode:
You fix, rushing towards the problem, needing to get things back on track, to figure it out - terrified of silence and not knowing what is going through the others’ head, convinced if you just keep working at it and don’t give up, you can make it better.
You shut down, pull back, retreating to the safety of your own thoughts until you’ve had time to calibrate, overwhelmed and overstimulated - not trusting yourself to not say the wrong thing & making it worse
Your values want you to show up with compassion, speaking clearly for yourself and listening openly to the other: but your body is flooded, you’re holding off your fight/flight/freeze/fawn response for dear life, and trying to remember how to use “I” statements while reminding yourself that your loved one is not the enemy.
You’re frustrated, triggered, and it feels hopeless. What does navigating relationships with love, consent, and respect look like when your needs are seemingly opposite? How can you be you, & me be me?
And even if you do it all right, moving through difference without spiraling into a blowout, you’re left exhausted, raw, and tender: definitely not an experience of ‘conflict brings you closer’.
My invitation for you:
We are hurt in relationship, and we heal in relationship.
It is an act of courage to keep showing up with love, connection, and vulnerability. Our relationships are our greatest teachers, and it is our work to take responsibility in tending to our own past hurts, so we can show up to both speak for our needs while being open to the other.
I’m here to pour care onto you, and help you build new trails for your energy to flow in & out with ease and trust.
I’m here to help you hold onto your values, while tending to your hurts so conflict doesn’t feel like death.
Because right now, your youngest parts & their toughest protectors are showing up to the hardest moments - old hurts getting so big & stacking on top of fresh bumbs its impossible to know the difference & skills are out the window.
I help you slow down and understand all that is happening for you when the words fly so quick, or shut down completely. Because when you know your patterns, they become easier to catch in the moment. And you stay online: able to pause long enough for a door cracks for you to make a different choice.
I help you build new skills, (because who of us has seen conflict modeled well?), so you have an anchor during tough moments to turn to, when you’ve done the hard work of catching the pattern.
Imagine… you, showing up in conflict with more presence & skill in the midst of intensity, speaking for rather than from your activation.
the other letters
I know these patterns and many others so well. And, you are so much more.
You are your care and your values, your natural gifts, the distinct way only you move through the world.
You’ve been seeking a healing space that finally holds you: not just your pathologies and traumas. A space where more is possible: not just another coping exercise or reframe.
You, in all your messy layers, are welcome here:
Your inner world: a stream of thoughts, reactions, hurts, impressions, judgments, desires, feelings, hot takes, biases, memories pin-balling around you, simply by nature of being alive
Your family: your people, your ancestors, the generations that surround you and that came before, and the ones who come after. The intergenerational lessons, gifts, and traumas that have been handed down. The sharpness in your voice that sounds like your mom, when criticism slides out without you noticing it; the stories full of wisdom and laughter, doled out along with the family recipes that taste like love.
Your relationships and community: you as a partner, a friend, a grandchild, a community member. You in conflict, faced with difference and ruptures.
Your identities: your body & how you move through the world, the ways systems have shaped you and your people before you. The ways supremacy culture seeps into everything, becomes internalized and takes root, needing careful weeding.
All of this is in the room with you, wherever you go. Your family, your community, and the world. We cannot have a space that is truly healing if we leave them at the door.
Healing can be so much more.
I see this pattern breaking, trauma healing, self-exploration work as the work of right relationship. Of relating to yourself with so much care and regard, so skilled at listening and responding to all parts of you - emotions, thoughts, body, spirit - that you fall in love with yourself.
But right now, the internal kitchen table is rife with conflict:
your goals, wants, and avoidance pulling in opposite directions
insecurities shoved into a corner, hurts and traumas wailing
various levels of coping tools, from substances to little treats to binge watching to totally dissociating, on standby
your nervous system fried
And what even is your body?
You hate how stuck, defeated, blocked you feel. None of it feels like wisdom, self-love, or a flow state where you’re in touch with “your beautiful intuitive and powerful self.”
Let me tell you about what I see:
I see that table, and I see how hard all parts of you are working. I see how the big emotions never experienced being held and scream so loudly in hopes of finally being seen, heard, and understood. I see how hard your perfectionist is striving to finally feel good enough, because being good meant being safe. I see how desperately your critic wants you to achieve your goals, but only ever learned to motivate through harshness and punishment.
I see how much love and appreciation wants to be poured into everyone gathered inside of you.
What if you could pour love onto all parts of you, too?
What if you could learn to listen to the fears your anxieties & avoidance bring to you?
What if you could sit with the hurts parts of you carry, pulling them into your lap, letting them feel your hug?
You inherently hold this ability, to turn to yourself with love - we all do - but so few of us have ever seen or learned how to do this.
(I see the forgetting, the intentional separation, of how to be present with ourselves as a wound of colonization).
In my own work, when I found decolonial IFS, it felt like the lights turned on inside. Nothing, and everything, changed - I came into focus for myself.
I hope this for you, too. So much becomes possible when we shift how we see ourselves & unlock the ability to relate to all parts of us. Not just the ones that are fun & easy - the play, the joy, the happy feelings, the comfort. But the blocks, the shadows, the avoidance, the bullies, the self-sabateurs.
Because our blocks - the ones we think are in the way of our goals and dreams, the ones blamed for keeping us stuck - reveal the unique map to our deepest healing and liberation.
I hold this as the work of internal abolition, where all parts of you are welcomed in and listened to so exquisitely, their unique wisdoms emerging.
Your relationship with yourself so expansive that there is room for all.
This is our work together.
In our work together, we turn the lights on inside and I walk you through meeting all parts of you. Because while you are the expert on you: the thoughts, feelings, emotions, memories that make YOU up, I am expert in guiding your exploration of yourself in ways that will liberate. Together, we co-create a space that is attuned to you and your specific healing path.
In our work together, I help you learn to listen to your blocks & stuck points, and you watch your understanding of yourself transform. Self-compassion isn’t a skill I teach, but a natural resource that emerges, unlocked by truly understanding yourself.
In our work together, when emotions get big, I’m there to hold it with you. I’ve got you, so you don’t have to hold yourself quite so tightly. My hope and intention is for you to feel held & supported, and if our space is not feeling that way, my ask is for you to let me know so we can shift and repair.
In our work, you become revealed: your power, your spirit, your energy, your sovereignty. You, and all the parts of you, a powerful and wise system.
We haven’t met yet, but if you’re resonating - I know your heart already. I see you, and you are magic. (I will hold that truth for you until you are ready to feel it for yourself.)
I’ve been there, I've got you, I can't wait to meet you.