Wendy’s Therapeutic Approach

she / her / hers
Title: Senior Associate Therapist
Registered Associate Marriage and Family Therapist: (AMFT 126869)
Registered Associate Professional Clinical Counselor: (APCC 9872)
Supervised by: Doug Ronning, LMFT, RDT/BCT, Katie Malone, LPCC, LMFT, and Grace Malonai, PhD, LPCC, BC-TMH

Phone: 925-954-6229, ext. 9

Schedule an Appointment  About Wendy

Safety and Trust

My intention is that we co-create a safe environment based on trust and mutual respect where you can explore your feelings. I encourage a strength-based approach to this exploration, helping to bring clarity to the many ways you’re already working towards healing, something I believe we are naturally wired to do. My trust in the healing process means that I have complete faith in your ability to lead the way, therefore I use a client-centered approach, designed to empower you to reconnect with your compassionate Self, the core part of you that is gentle and wise.

Honoring Your Uniqueness

I bring open-hearted curiosity to learning about and honoring the way you move through the world. Together we’ll work on helping to increase your self-awareness, self-appreciation, and self-expression, surfacing your unique strengths and gifts, moving away from judgement, shame and isolation, and toward joy and ease. As a woman of color and a single mom with three kids who are all neurodiverse in their own way, I get what it’s like to feel different. I understand the many traps that society, our communities and sometimes even our families set for us either purposely or accidentally. Being different can make us feel misunderstood, judged, shamed, isolated and under-appreciated. Identifying as different means I also understand the healing power of inclusivity. Part of what I love about working with people who are gifted, highly sensitive or exploring their identity, is having the opportunity to witness and celebrate your uniqueness, helping to foster your confidence and reminding you that you are not alone, in fact, you’re in amazing company.

Trauma informed

The study of trauma is something I feel passionately about. In our work together, I always strive to work from a trauma-informed perspective, respecting your innate capacity to heal and exploring together, where appropriate, the neurobiology of trauma with the intention to help you better understand how it changes the brain. With an increased understanding of how trauma works in the body, we can focus on the right interventions that will help you in your healing, always bringing great sensitivity to your needs.

Systems Approach & Attachment

None of us exists in a vacuum. Our work together will take into account that you are a complex individual who is inextricably connected to your family, community and society. Together we will endeavour to get a better understanding of how the important relationships in your life impact your emotions, choices, priorities and point of view. Exploring the way you relate to and connect with others is made more meaningful when we get curious about attachment, and how your attachment style influences your feelings and behavior, as well as your relationships.

Somatic Orientation

Emotions can be overwhelming, leaving us confused about where to start when it comes to healing. I’m a big fan of starting with the body. The body gives us so many useful clues about what’s important to us. Sometimes we’ll pretend we’re fine when we’re really not, but as Dr. Bessel van der Kolk says, the body keeps the score. I invite you to tap into the vast wisdom of your body. Checking in with where in the body you feel a particular emotion creates a starting point for our exploration. In addition, I offer guided meditation, stretching and breathing together as tools for self-regulation.

Parts Work

In sharing their stories, clients often say “A part of me feels…” When I hear this, I take a moment to explain Dr. Richard Schwartz’s theory of multiplicity of self, meaning we’re all made up of parts. We’ve all experienced a sad part, an angry part, an excited part, a scared part, a part that avoids, a part that controls, and so on. If you’re interested in parts work, we can explore your parts for the purpose of checking out how they’re working together and where they’re at odds. We don’t need to judge our parts, instead, we thank them for working so hard to try to protect us, and the part of us that’s able to observe them, the Self, starts to be able to acknowledge and better communicate with the rest. Once the Self can take the lead, it becomes easier to soothe and tend to the parts of us that feel wounded. We emerge more empowered than before.

Buddhist Philosophy – Mindfulness

It’s natural for us to want to get control of our circumstances and keep things fixed, but nature just doesn’t work like that. All things in nature are born, grow, decay and die. We humans are no exception, no matter how much we wish we were. Our lives are filled with so much change and this can create intense feelings. So how can we begin to relax into this truth? How can we find peace in this groundless reality? Where appropriate, I offer the perspective of my teachers, Jack Kornfield, Ram Dass and Pema Chodron, as well as the work of various poets and sages, as inspiration for your contemplation. Also, I believe that everything that happens to you in life provides a curriculum for your growth. As Ram Dass says, it’s all “grist for the mill.”

Tangible Skills for the Journey

Sitting with the turbulence of the human experience takes practice and to that end, I offer guided meditation, breathing and stretching exercises that we can do together or for you to do outside sessions. These exercises help with the greater healing journey and also provide focused tools for you to use in stressful moments. I also encourage journaling between sessions to encourage the flow of thoughts and feelings, so that your healing experience keeps up its momentum between our sessions together.

Nonviolent Communication

I’m a big fan of nonviolent communication, founded by Marshall Rosenberg, Ph.D. I’ll use NVC to help you bring clarity, compassion, self-responsibility and empathy to your relationships. Especially effective with couples, we’ll explore your feelings, using a technique called relationship mapping, that helps you identify your feelings and map them on to unmet needs. Once you understand the unmet needs that are driving your emotions, we work on holding these unmet needs with great care, never pinning them on any one individual, but instead wondering together how they came to be unmet and if there are alternative ways to tend to them.

Humor

I think humor is one of the most underrated healing tools! Laughing has been neurological proven to do so many good things. It decreases cortisol, the stress hormone and increases highly sought after brain chemicals like dopamine, oxytocin and endorphins, increasing empathy, relieving stress and anxiety, improving immune functioning and cardiovascular health, and most important, your mood. It also helps give you a reset when you’re stressed or angry or scared, decreasing your heart rate, and lowering your blood pressure and muscle tension. In sessions, I love laughing together, whether it’s about celebrating something positive that happened to you or just a good old appreciation for how absurd the world can be, laughter connects us, and I look forward to laughing with you.