My Approach
This is what comes after insight.
Some people arrive here with years of self-work behind them: therapy, books, coaching. They understand why they do what they do. The insight just hasn’t been enough to change them.
Others arrive having never done much reflection at all, highly competent, carrying everything, and starting to notice that the way they’ve been operating is costing more than it’s worth.
Both are in the right place.
The insight isn’t the problem. The problem is that insight alone doesn’t change automatic responses, the body’s habits, or the relational dynamics that play out before the mind even has a chance to intervene. Somatic therapy Understanding why you do something and being able to do something different are two completely separate skills. Somatic therapy focuses on the second one.
How we work
Four phases, one direction: forward.
Identify the Pattern
Most patterns aren’t random. We get specific, tracing what the pattern is, where it came from, and how it operates across your life.
Track It in Real Time
Knowing where a pattern comes from is different from catching it as it’s happening. We build that capacity, in the body, in the moment.
Interrupt & Shift
Rather than gaining more insight, we practice something different together, in real time, in the room. This is where the work becomes directive.
Integrate
Change that only happens in the therapy room isn’t change, it’s practice. This phase is about translation into your actual life.
In depth
Identify the Pattern
Most patterns aren’t random. They developed as survival strategies to early relationships, to stress, to environments that required a certain way of being. They made sense once. Now they’re running on autopilot in contexts where they no longer serve you.
In this phase, we get specific about what’s happening in your thoughts, your body’s responses, and your behavior, trace its origins, and look at how it operates across different areas of your life.
This phase is also where we start building your somatic literacy, and I often use Enneagram-informed frameworks here as well, not as a personality label, but as a precise map of core motivations, habitual strategies, and the fears that drive them.
Track It in Real Time
Knowing where the behavior comes from is different from catching it as it’s happening. This phase is about building the capacity to notice, in your body, your thoughts, your emotional state, the moment it activates.
Most automatic responses happen faster than conscious thought. Somatic awareness work gives you access to those signals before it fully takes hold. We pay attention to what’s happening physically under stress, in conflict, in moments of disconnection, because the body often knows what the mind hasn’t caught up to yet.
Interrupt & Shift
This is where the work becomes directive.
Rather than gaining more insight about why it happens, we practice something different together, in real time, in the room. I’ll engage directly, challenge what needs to be challenged, and work with you to build something new before you’re expected to produce it in your life.
In practice this might look like working through a regulation technique together, running through a real scenario from your life to find where the shift is possible, or practicing a different response to something that usually pulls you off center. The goal is that by the time you leave the room, you’ve already done the thing at least once.
Integrate
What happens in the room only matters if it travels with you.
Change becomes real through repetition. Enough reps of responding differently, in real moments, until the new response stops feeling like effort and starts feeling like you.
Integration isn’t something you decide to do. It’s something that happens when you’ve had enough small, meaningful experiences of showing up differently that your nervous system starts to trust it. The emotional and cognitive flexibility that felt like work begins to feel more natural. That’s the shift we’re building toward.
The tools I draw from
Four frameworks, working together.
Somatic Therapy
This is a body-based approach to psychotherapy that works with the nervous system’s role in stress, trauma, illness, and emotional experience. In practice, this means learning to read and respond to what your body is already signaling below conscious awareness, before the mind has had a chance to catch up. Honoring yourself as biological being not just as bundle of stories. It’s making room for all of it. This is often where real change begins for high-functioning anxiety, burnout, apathy, and chronic stress.
Enneagram
The Enneagram is a developmental personality system that identifies nine distinct types, each defined by core motivations, fears, and habitual ways of navigating the world. Unlike using it simply to identify a type, in therapy it becomes a map for true development. Understanding not just how you’re wired, but where you’re stuck and what growth actually looks like for you specifically. And in relational work, it becomes a compassionate lens for understanding the people you love, and why they move through the world the way they do.
Relational & Attachment Work
Attachment-based therapy focuses on the thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and relational dynamics that developed through early experiences with caregivers. In practice, this means understanding why you react and respond the way you do in close relationships. This may show up as anxious or avoidant attachment, relationship anxiety, a fear of disconnection, or catastrophizing when things feel uncertain. Because these wounds formed in relationship, they also heal there. A therapist’s steady, unconditional positive regard and non-judgement, is often the necessary ingredient that lets old attachment patterns begin to shift.
Existential Exploration
Not everything that brings someone to therapy is a problem to be solved. Existential therapy allows us to explore the anxiety, dread, and apathy that arise when we sit with questions of identity, meaning, responsibility, and how you want to live, without rushing toward a resolution. It often surfaces during major life transitions, when old definitions of success stop fitting and the questions turn toward purpose, meaning, and who you are beyond what you accomplish.
“Understanding why you do something and being able to do something different are two completely separate skills. This work focuses on the second one.”Katie Sharpe, LMFT
If this sounds like the kind of work you’ve been looking for –
Let’s find out if we’re a good fit. A free 20-minute consultation is the easiest first step.
Book a Free Consultation