Our Approach

The Roots Method

Work with what’s underneath.

Most people come to therapy hoping to cut down what’s bothering them — the anxiety, the depression, the symptom in front of them. But symptoms are what grows above ground. The actual work happens at the roots: the patterns shaping how you respond, the experiences your nervous system is still processing, the quiet beliefs that organize your life without your notice.

The Roots Method braids three approaches:

The three approaches

EMDR

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing

for the unprocessed experiences that keep informing the present

Some experiences, when they happen, are too much for the brain to fully process in real time. The body files them away as if they're still happening — and they keep firing in the background, shaping how you respond to the present long after the moment is over. EMDR is a structured way of revisiting those stored experiences with enough safety and bilateral stimulation that your nervous system can finally finish processing them. People often describe it as the memory still being there, but no longer carrying the same weight. I use EMDR most often with trauma, anxiety with a clear root, and the kind of stuck patterns that talk therapy alone hasn't quite reached. We'll talk about whether it fits, and we'll go at your pace.

CBT

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

for the thought patterns that grew tall because they never got pruned

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is the one most people have heard of: identifying the thought patterns that keep you stuck, examining whether they're actually accurate, and practicing different responses. What I find most useful about CBT isn't the worksheets — it's the slow rebuilding of the loop between thought, feeling, and behavior. When you can catch a familiar thought a beat earlier than usual, you start to have more options about what happens next. I lean on CBT for anxiety, depression, and the kind of perfectionism or self-blame that's gotten dialed up over years of being good at something hard. It's structured, but it's not robotic — most of the work is paying attention to what your mind actually does, with a kind and curious witness.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness-Based Practice

as the practice that lets you notice what’s happening underneath in the first place

Mindfulness, in my work, isn't about meditating perfectly or emptying your mind. It's the practice of noticing — of staying with what's happening in your body and your attention long enough to actually see it, before you react. Most of what makes therapy work, in my experience, is this: building the capacity to be present with hard things without being swept away by them. The skills are simple — slowing down, tracking sensation, naming what you notice — but they make every other modality more useful. EMDR works better when you can stay grounded; CBT works better when you can catch a thought arriving rather than already moving. We work on this gently, in small doses. No one needs to become a meditator; everyone benefits from a little more space between stimulus and response.

It’s not faster. But the changes tend to last.

What a session feels like

You don’t have to come in with a clean version of the story.

Most sessions are quieter than people expect. We meet for fifty-five minutes, usually weekly to start — that’s the cadence where the work actually accumulates — and we adjust as we go. Some weeks we’re working on what’s loud: a hard conversation that’s coming up, a thought loop that won’t quiet down, a recent event that’s still moving through. Other weeks we’re working on the quieter thing in the corner — a pattern that’s been there for a long time, a feeling that doesn’t have words yet, a piece of your story you’ve been holding alone. Sessions happen at my office in Eagle, or by telehealth if you’re elsewhere in Idaho. You don’t have to know where to start. That’s part of the work — figuring out where the threads are. Mostly I listen carefully, ask honest questions, and stay close enough that you don’t have to go in alone.

What change looks like over time

First few weeks
Mapping the terrain
The first few sessions are mostly orientation. We get to know what brought you in, what you've already tried, what's working, what isn't. I'll ask questions that probably aren't the ones you're expecting — what does this feel like in your body, what was happening the year before this got loud, who taught you that this had to be your job to fix. By the third or fourth session, we usually have a working sense of which threads to pull.
Around 3 months
The first shifts
Change at this stage usually feels small from the inside, even when it's significant. People notice they're catching the familiar thought a beat earlier, or that they slept through the night for a week, or that a thing that used to spike them barely registered. It can feel like nothing's changed and everything's changed at once. This is where it's important to keep going — the deeper work tends to land in months four through seven.
At six months and beyond
Structural change
Around the half-year mark, the changes tend to become more structural. The patterns that organized your life without your notice start to soften. Relationships shift — sometimes the people in them, more often the way you show up in them. Work might look different, or feel different. The voice in your head might be a little kinder. The work isn't finished — there's no “finished” — but there's usually a clear sense by now of who you're becoming on the other side of this.

Most of what’s changed, you’ll notice in retrospect.

Curious if this fits?

The best way to know if we’re a good match is to connect. I offer a free 15-minute consultation to answer your questions and see whether what you’re looking for is what I work with.

Schedule a free 15-minute consultation