Dana Basu (she/her)

Traumatic experiences have a way of pulling the rug out from underneath you, leaving you to feel unstable and out of control. Perhaps your thoughts are incessantly forcing you to remember the very thing or things you don’t want to remember. Maybe you’re having frequent nightmares or finding yourself resisting sleep despite your desperate need for rest. Maybe you feel constantly on edge, irritable, or always on alert. With the right support, people do recover from trauma.

The world is not experienced in the same way for everyone, and for Highly Sensitive People, the differences can feel enormous. Although these differences have both positive and negative consequences, the negative ones are oftentimes highlighted — by others and by yourself. It can be easy to question yourself, criticize yourself, and shame yourself for being different. But what you may not yet realize is these differences have a beauty all their own.

The job of parenthood can be both the most rewarding experience as well as the most challenging. And no amount of homework prepares us for the rollercoaster of emotions we go through once we embark on the journey. Whether you're experiencing sheer depletion, raising a child with special needs, struggling with the challenges of tiny humans and their big feelings, or feeling like your own needs are getting lost, I can help. Lets get started today.

Attachment Based Therapy recognizes the influential role that our early caregivers have in shaping how we are in relationships throughout our lives. When our early relationships are inadequate (either physically or psychologically), we can build up psychological coping skills to protect ourselves. These methods of coping are often very adaptive in the moment, but can interfere with our ability to engage in healthy relationships now. Therapy can help create healthier ways of being in relationship

Relational therapy brings the focus of treatment into the present by focusing on the relationship between therapist and client. In relational therapy, we explore feelings that arise during sessions to identify expectations, fears, and coping skills that impact your relationships. Once identified, we can consider whether they are still helpful. For people with difficult childhood experiences, relational therapy can offer an important contrast by providing safe, consistent, and reliable care.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is a widely utilized approach to therapy, which targets problems in clients’ lives by identifying maladaptive thoughts and behaviors and replacing them with more helpful ones. Because we are not always aware of our thoughts, therapy can help you to uncover them and work to build more helpful thoughts and behaviors.

The way we feel about ourselves tends to be fairly stable across time, and when that inner assessment is negative, it can leave us to carry that heavy burden throughout our lives. You may hold a list of reasons why you feel this way about yourself, but very often these feelings are not connected to any true flaw, and instead are the result of wounds you experienced in your early relationships. Healing those wounds is your pathway to a healthier and more fulfilling relationship with yourself.

Anxiety is a necessary emotion, but when it starts to have a constant presence, it can really become disruptive. Anxiety can lead to sleep problems, impaired relationships, irritability, physical illness, and more. Often times it's not as simple as learning a quick coping skill to reduce the prevalence of that anxiety. Sometimes it requires us to better understand the reason it's there in the first place and tend to that before we can start to see change.

People seeking support to work through trauma need providers who understand the impact of trauma on the mind and the body. As someone who specializes in the treatment of trauma, I understand the delicate nature of this work and help you to feel safe and secure first. I utilize gentle tools to help you work through the trauma, while emphasizing your ability to modify the process however you need.