Megan has over 10 years of experience working with a diverse population of people in social services and mental health fields, with many clients she has worked with having been impacted by trauma. Megan is skilled as a therapist at working with people impacted by trauma (including PTSD), dissociative issues (including dissociative identity disorder), depression, and anxiety.
Megan approaches therapy from a place of compassion, a desire to empower clients, and a strong belief in the ability of people to heal and grow. Megan strives to be a compassionate, open-minded, and welcoming therapist. Throughout your time together, Megan will work hard to empower you. She believes strongly in the inherent resilience of people, and believes that all people can improve their mental health, no matter how much they may be struggling at the moment. She strives to build a therapeutic relationship in which you can trust her and feel secure.
Megan approaches therapy from a place of compassion, a desire to empower clients, and a strong belief in the ability of people to heal and grow. Megan strives to be a compassionate, open-minded, and welcoming therapist. Throughout your time together, Megan will work hard to empower you. She believes strongly in the inherent resilience of people, and believes that all people can improve their mental health, no matter how much they may be struggling at the moment. She strives to build a therapeutic relationship in which you can trust her and feel secure.
Trauma Therapy
Through many years of working with people in emotional pain, Megan has learned that current mental health struggles are often rooted in past experiences or traumas. Trauma can be the result of big situations, such as abuse, a car accident, or fighting in a war, and trauma can also be the result of “smaller” situations, such as having an overly strict teacher in school. Sometimes, we don’t realize that these past experiences were adverse or traumatic until we begin addressing them in therapy. Trauma in part has to do with the event itself, but also has a lot to do with how that event has impacted someone. Often, someone’s current mental health challenges are a result of these past experiences getting triggered or activated in our brains and bodies and subsequently contributing to current thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and body responses. When “smaller” types of situations have been traumatic they can cause a wide variety of mental health challenges including depression and anxiety, not just common trauma-related disorders such as PTSD.
In treating trauma, Megan uses a triphasic trauma-treatment model, incorporating both EMDR and Ego State Therapy (a form of parts work therapy). During the first phase, “safety and stabilization”, the focus in therapy is on helping you learn various skills and strategies to better manage emotional distress on a day-to-day basis. The second phase “trauma processing” is when past traumatic memories are addressed in-depth and you are helped to make new meaning of these past experiences. In the third phase “integration”, you learn how to live the life that you want in the hear-and-now, now that your brain is no longer being triggered by past events.
In treating trauma, Megan uses a triphasic trauma-treatment model, incorporating both EMDR and Ego State Therapy (a form of parts work therapy). During the first phase, “safety and stabilization”, the focus in therapy is on helping you learn various skills and strategies to better manage emotional distress on a day-to-day basis. The second phase “trauma processing” is when past traumatic memories are addressed in-depth and you are helped to make new meaning of these past experiences. In the third phase “integration”, you learn how to live the life that you want in the hear-and-now, now that your brain is no longer being triggered by past events.
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EMDR
EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is one of the treatment approaches that Megan uses. EMDR is a treatment that extensive research has shown is highly effective in treating many mental health conditions including, but not limited to, PTSD, depression, and anxiety. Like Megan’s belief, EMDR is also based on the idea that many present mental health challenges in a person’s life stem from past adverse or traumatic events. When these past experiences get triggered, they cause undesirable patterns of thoughts, feelings, body sensations, and/or behaviors in your current life. Through EMDR, we use a unique process that helps you gain insight and make new connections regarding past and present events to help resolve your present symptoms. Through EMDR, you will understand what past events are contributing to your current symptoms and use something called bilateral stimulation, which helps activate your brain in a similar way as happens during REM sleep, and subsequently helps you make new meaning out of past experiences so these experiences stop causing distress. Ultimately, EMDR helps to activate and utilize your brain’s natural healing abilities to reach your mental health goals.
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Ego State Therapy (parts work)
Ego State Therapy is a treatment that focuses on understanding ourselves through the perspective that we all have distinct parts of ourselves that may be activated in different situations. For example, if you’ve ever gotten uncharacteristically upset about something and it just didn’t quite feel like the you that you know yourself to be, that’s a part of you that got activated. In Ego State Therapy, we work to understand your unique parts, which can often include gaining insight into when and why these parts developed. We work to uncover why at one time it may have been helpful to have a certain part of self develop, even when having that response pattern today is no longer adaptive or helpful. We explore different ways to help all parts of self function the best in the present. Megan also uses a variety of techniques to help you resolve any unresolved issues from the past that may be getting activated so that you can more often feel and act in ways that feel genuine to who you are.
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For mental health emergencies and crises, please contact 9-8-8 or go to your nearest hospital’s emergency room.
PO Box 502
Clinton, WA 98236 Physical address also located in Clinton, WA |
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