Cristina Isabel Slaney, MA, LMHCA

Being a person is hard. When you've spent your whole life in survival mode, living a life you love is even harder. When your soul feels like it is perpetually bleeding, it feels impossible to just be and enjoy your one short life. Emotional wounds from our past have a way of wreaking havoc on our lives and bodies in the present. It puts a deep shadow over all of life. Now, you feel like a victim of your own body and a liability to your relationships. You’re afraid that if people really got to know you, no one would be able to accept you. Believe me, you are not alone. I've been there and I know how scary and difficult it can be to change and enter into the unknown. You are in good company.

My therapeutic approach is to work with our relationship in the here and now, in the space between us. I will partner to support and guide you with gentle curiosity and empathic attunement to help you explore your fear, anxiety, desires, dreams, and existential dread that are keeping you from living the life you want and becoming the person you are made to be. Through somatic modalities such as mindfulness, body scanning, breathwork, and bottom up approaches (which means moving our bodies as if we feel something and then our emotion reflects our motion!), you will learn to tune into how your body is feeling, you will have greater capacity to live in the present moment, to tolerate distress, and repair the mental processes that can keep you resilient during stress. The relationship we build will allow us to explore and bring awareness to adaptive patterns that are now contributing to dis-ease and begin to re-integrate your mind, body, and emotions through the reparative experiences between us that you can carry into the rest of your life. You can begin to face your fears and limitations and have more agency in choosing what it is you want for yourself.