Origins of Heart Led Psychology
Coincidental though it may have been, sharing about the birth of my new private practice, Heart Led Psychology, around my own birthday feels very aligned. Birthdays are a time for new beginnings, but they are also a time for reflection. As I started sharing with my supportive friends and family on social media, the origins of Heart Led Psychology stem back to little Jessica around her 4th birthday. That is when I started showing symptoms of trauma. For almost a year I was near constantly crying, isolating, so afraid to be seen that I would hide around my mother’s feet. I even told her I wanted to die.
For most of my life I was unaware of the severity of my symptoms during this time. It was not until I started working at a child abuse program during my training in graduate school for my PhD in Clinical Psychology that my mother shared with me a journal she had kept all those years ago chronicling my symptoms and her own despair at trying to find me help. My mind had no recollection of this, but I realized that my body did remember. What happened to me lived in the tension in my belly, the breath I held, and the fear I still carried about being fully seen.
But today, after over a decade of working with clients, supervising fellow clinicians (who are humans with their own stories as well), and doing my own deep inner work, that I present myself to be seen in my fullness. Heart Led Psychology is an offering from my heart. The name came to me around my last birthday, at the ancient temples of Angkor Wat. Our society has a lot to learn from indigenous cultures - they were much more in tune with the natural world, their bodies, the wisdom of their spirit.
I have trained with esteemed traditionally trained therapists and traveled the world learning from wise spiritual teachers and meditators. My psychodynamic training informs my conceptualization and relational framework and my training in cognitive-behavioral therapy provides structure and coping when needed, but I am enormously grateful that my personal and professional evolution has led me to trauma-informed approaches as well. I have seen the incredible ability of somatic psychology, parts work (Internal Family Systems), and ketamine-assisted psychotherapy to help people embody their emotions and accept parts of themselves holding them back and keeping them small. I have done intensive training in Integral Somatic Psychology, described as the crown jewel of body-based approaches. I have seen the profound ability of this approach to help people build a greater capacity for both pleasant and unpleasant emotion and make lasting change.
The truth is that all humans have suffered in some way and we all want to live from our fullness. Being human will always be hard, especially these days, but we can all benefit from increasing our capacity to be with our emotions. There is beauty in learning to appreciate all the parts of us, the full range of our human emotion, and what these aspects have to teach us. The start of Heart Led Psychology is a manifestation of my own story, my life’s work, and my desire to help others - adults, adolescents, and families - live in their fullness too. I hope what I share in this newsletter going forward at the intersection of psychology, philosophy, and spirituality is meaningful to you. And I hope if you or someone you know reading this is on a healing journey that you direct them to Heart Led Psychology. Thank you for holding a little piece of my heart.