Areas of Expertise
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
EMDR can be a helpful tool for those who have symptoms of PTSD, depression, and anxiety, as well as for those who would like to have more insight into their thoughts and feelings. It is a multi-step process that uses the brain's natural desire to integrate memories in an adaptive manner. Through EMDR, clients can resource positive feelings they have for themselves, process traumatic memories, and practice adaptive changes they would like to make in the future. While EMDR will not erase a person's distressing memories, it can help a person have more space to grow even though these memories exist.
Creative Arts Therapy
Over time, some experiences can reduce a person's access to creativity, flexibility, and play, leading to difficulties making decisions, dulling one's joy, and even limiting access to curiosity. Heather uses the creative arts therapies as an integrative approach to therapy that can help people make meaning of their experiences, reconnect with themselves and their emotions, identify and set boundaries, as well as gain insight, self-awareness, and clarity.
LGBTQIA+ Affirming
Heather has a specific focus in providing care to teens, adults, and couples who are members of the LGBTQIA+ communities, as well as their allies and loved ones.
Clinical Supervision
Heather provides clinical supervision to colleagues who would like to deepen their knowledge and implementation of creative practices as therapists. Heather draws on her background with creative arts therapies, parts work, and EMDR, to provide her supervisees with a holistic approach to understanding trauma, attachment, and relationships.
Bio
Heather received her masters from NYU (New York University) in Art Therapy. Subsequently, Heather trained in EMDR through The Center for Excellence in EMDR Therapy, trained in couples therapy at The William Alanson White Institute, trained in Music and Imagery at the Institute for Music and Consciousness, and is currently taking analytic courses at the Institute for Expressive Analysis. Heather has given presentations as a Guest Lecturer at NYU on the use of Art Therapy in treatment with children and adolescents, has presented internationally on the integration of creative arts therapies into psychiatry, as well as presented in continuing education workshops that focus on issues facing LGBTQIA+ communities. She also provides clinical supervision to colleagues in the field. She is the current Membership Chair on the board of the Institute for Expressive Analysis (IEA).
Heather draws from humanistic, relational, psychodynamic, and queer perspectives on therapy and combines this with her background in creative arts therapies, EMDR, parts work, and verbal psychotherapy. Heather's approach is trauma informed. She has advanced training and knowledge in how trauma can affect a person and how to work with a person's relationship to these memories and experiences. Heather is passionate about the ways in which creativity can prompt brain plasticity and the ways in which thinking outside of rigid binaries can offer people new avenues for seeing themselves and their relationships.
