My Approach
Therapy that helps you understand your patterns, feel what is underneath them, and create new ways of connecting.
You may already understand a great deal about yourself.
You may know why you react the way you do, recognize the patterns that keep repeating, and still feel unable to change what happens when emotions become intense or connection feels uncertain.
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) helps us move beyond explanation alone. Together, we slow things down, make sense of what is happening beneath the surface, and create new emotional experiences that can lead to lasting change.
Relationships shape us
Human beings are wired for connection.
From our earliest relationships, we learn what it means to need someone, depend on someone, trust someone, and risk being known. These experiences influence much more than our romantic relationships. They shape how we experience ourselves, manage emotion, seek comfort, respond to rejection, and navigate closeness.
When connection feels secure, we are often more able to explore, take risks, recover from disappointment, and show up authentically in our lives.
When connection has felt uncertain, unavailable, or unsafe, we may learn to protect ourselves by withdrawing, becoming highly self reliant, working harder for reassurance, minimizing our needs, or staying constantly alert to signs of disconnection.
These responses are not evidence that something is wrong with you. They are adaptations that developed within the relationships and experiences that shaped you.
Your patterns make sense
I do not assume that your anxiety, withdrawal, anger, perfectionism, caretaking, or need for reassurance appeared without reason.
These responses often began as attempts to protect you, preserve connection, or help you survive emotionally difficult experiences.
You may have learned to stay quiet because speaking up led to conflict. You may have become highly capable because depending on others felt risky. You may pursue reassurance because distance feels unbearable. You may withdraw because you fear disappointing someone, becoming overwhelmed, or making things worse.
In therapy, we approach these patterns with curiosity rather than judgment.
Instead of asking, “What is wrong with me?” we begin asking, “What happens inside me here?” and “What is this response trying to protect?”
When your patterns become understandable, they can begin to soften.
We are never so vulnerable as when we love.
- Dr. Sue Johnson
Insight is important, but experience changes us
Many clients begin therapy with a strong intellectual understanding of themselves.
You may be able to explain your family history, identify your attachment style, recognize your triggers, and describe exactly why a pattern exists. That insight matters, but insight alone does not always change what happens in the moment.
When fear, shame, loneliness, or rejection is activated, the nervous system often responds before the thinking mind has time to intervene.
EFT helps us work with what is happening emotionally, physically, and relationally in the present moment.
We may slow down a recent interaction, notice what happened in your body, listen for the emotion beneath your immediate reaction, and explore what you needed but could not say.
Over time, therapy becomes more than a place where you talk about change. It becomes a place where you begin to experience something different.
You may risk expressing a need instead of hiding it. You may remain emotionally present instead of shutting down. You may respond to yourself with compassion rather than criticism. You may reach for someone you love in a clearer and more vulnerable way.
These moments create the foundation for lasting emotional and relational change.
Therapy is collaborative and active
Therapy with me is warm, engaged, and collaborative.
I will listen carefully, but I will not simply sit back while you recount what happened. I may pause you, slow down an important moment, help you notice what is happening inside, or invite you to say something in a new way.
Together, we look for the emotional patterns that organize your experience.
We pay attention to what happens when you feel hurt, afraid, alone, misunderstood, or uncertain. We notice the protective responses that follow and the consequences those responses may unintentionally create.
I may help you:
- Recognize the cycle you become caught in
- Identify the emotions and attachment needs beneath your reactions
- Stay with an important feeling long enough to understand it
- Put words to experiences that have been difficult to express
- Share something vulnerable within the safety of therapy
- Practice responding to yourself or someone you love in a new way
The goal is not to force emotion or make you disclose more than feels safe. We work at a pace that respects your nervous system while still gently moving toward the places where change is possible.
Individual Therapy
Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT)
Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy, also called EFIT, is an attachment based approach for adults who want to understand themselves more deeply and create lasting emotional change.
In individual therapy, we explore the patterns that shape how you relate to yourself and to the people who matter most.
You may be struggling with anxiety, perfectionism, grief, shame, self criticism, relationship distress, major life transitions, or a persistent sense that you must manage everything alone.
Rather than treating these struggles as isolated symptoms, EFIT helps us understand how they developed and what they may be protecting.
We may explore questions such as:
- What happens inside you when you feel rejected, disappointed, or alone?
- What emotions feel dangerous, unacceptable, or overwhelming?
- What do you long for from others but struggle to ask for?
- What happens when you need comfort, reassurance, rest, or support?
- How do you speak to yourself when you feel vulnerable or uncertain?
Through this process, you can begin to build a more secure relationship with yourself and develop greater freedom in your relationships with others.
The work is not about becoming less emotional or less dependent on connection.
It is about becoming more able to understand your emotions, respond to your needs, and reach for connection in ways that feel safe, clear, and authentic.
Couples Therapy
Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFCT)
When couples become distressed, the relationship can begin to feel like the problem.
One partner may pursue, question, criticize, or intensify in an attempt to restore connection. The other may withdraw, become quiet, defend, minimize, or shut down in an attempt to reduce conflict or avoid failure.
The more each person protects themselves, the more the other person may feel abandoned, criticized, unimportant, or unsafe.
Over time, this creates a negative cycle that can take over the relationship.
In Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, also called EFCT, I do not begin by deciding which partner is right or who needs to change.
The cycle is the problem, not either partner.
Together, we slow down the moments when disconnection occurs and identify what happens beneath each person’s protective response.
Anger may contain hurt.
Criticism may contain fear and longing.
Withdrawal may contain shame, overwhelm, or a fear of making things worse.
Defensiveness may protect against feeling inadequate or unlovable.
As partners begin to understand the deeper emotions within the cycle, they can start responding to one another differently.
Couples therapy may help you:
- Recognize and interrupt recurring conflict patterns
- Understand the emotional meaning beneath each partner’s reactions
- Express needs and fears more clearly
- Respond with greater accessibility and emotional presence
- Repair attachment injuries and painful ruptures
- Rebuild trust, emotional safety, and intimacy
- Create a more secure and responsive bond
The goal is not perfect communication or a relationship without conflict.
The goal is to help you know how to find each other again when disconnection happens.
Secure relationships become a safe haven to return to and a secure base from which to explore the world.
A central principle of Attachment Theory and Emotionally Focused Therapy.
Family therapy may also be available when attachment relationships within the family are central to the concerns bringing you to therapy.
A different kind of change
You do not need to become a different person in order to heal.
The parts of you that withdraw, pursue, perform, protect, control, or caretake developed for meaningful reasons.
Therapy creates space to understand those parts, access what lies beneath them, and develop new ways of responding that are more aligned with the life and relationships you want.
Change becomes possible when you feel safe enough to encounter yourself differently.
Ready to begin?
I offer online EFT psychotherapy for individuals and couples who are physically located in Missouri.