RESOURCES | Renaissance Healing PLLC

CONTENT

Things to support your
healing outside of session

Whether you've never sat across from a therapist before or we've already done the hard work together in session this space is for you. These resources were created to meet you wherever you are: curious, in-between, rebuilding, or just needing a little something to hold onto on the hard days. Take what feels useful. Leave what doesn't. Healing isn't linear, and neither is this.

Some things here are completely free with no email required, no strings attached. Others are small things you can purchase to carry the work with you. Either way, you're welcome here.

Enjoy some Content on me!

Feelings Wheel

A simple visual tool to help you identify, name, and better understand your emotions.

Felt Sense Index

A guided reference to help you notice and describe body sensations and internal states with more clarity.

Understanding Functional Freeze (PDF)

An accessible overview of functional freeze—what it is, how it shows up, and why it’s a nervous system response rather than a personal failure.

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Growth isn’t just about getting out of your comfort zone.

It’s about finding the sweet spot between safety and stretch.

Too much safety? You stay the same.
Too much stretch? Your nervous system starts filing complaints.

Real growth happens when you feel supported enough to take a risk and challenged enough to discover you’re capable of more than you thought.

Think of it less like jumping off a cliff and more like reaching for the next branch.

Your nervous system wasn’t designed to live in comfort forever.
It also wasn’t designed to live in survival mode.

Growth asks for both:
🌱 One foot in safety.
✨ One foot in possibility.

That’s where the magic tends to happen.

#healing #therapy #growth #confidence

this one is for me.

and for Paul, who watched a seventeen year old girl hold a busy friday night hostage over the quality of a dry erase marker and somehow kept a straight face the whole time. who got me every single thing i asked for and never let me live it down. who could make me laugh and make me work harder and make me feel like i actually belonged in a room, sometimes all in the same five minutes.

the kind of boss who bullied you lovingly and believed in you loudly and somehow made both feel like the same thing.

rest easy, Paul. thank you for the marker. thank you for all of it.

Somewhere along the way, many of us learned that the goal of nervous system work is to feel calm.

But a healthy nervous system isn’t one that never experiences discomfort.

It’s one that can stay connected to itself while moving through discomfort.

The purpose of regulation is not to avoid activation. The purpose of regulation is to increase your capacity to stay present when activation inevitably happens.

Sometimes somatic work helps us slow down, soften, and settle.

And sometimes it helps us stay present long enough to send the text, set the boundary, have the conversation, take the risk, or tolerate not knowing.

I’ve seen people become incredibly skilled at grounding, breathing, tracking sensations, and resourcing—while still organizing their lives around avoiding rejection, uncertainty, grief, conflict, vulnerability, or change.

At that point, the practice may no longer be creating capacity. It may be creating comfort.

Growth requires both safety and stretch.

A flexible nervous system can experience fear without letting fear make every decision.

Because healing isn’t learning how to feel calm all the time.

It’s learning how to stay with yourself when you don’t.

#healingjourney #nervoussystemhealing #selfcompassion #therapistsofinstagram

Your client doesn’t just need tools. They need to experience that their pain can be held and not fixed, not rushed through, not escaped.

When a client arrives in urgency ..desperate to know, to do, to solve, their nervous system is in survival mode. And ours can follow. That pull you feel to give answers, fill silences, be more helpful? That’s entrainment. That’s their system recruiting yours.

The most powerful thing you can do in those moments isn’t reach for a technique. It’s find your own ground first.

From there, everything changes: what you offer, how you offer it, and what your client actually receives.

Swipe for a breakdown of what’s happening in these moments, and how to work with it — somatically and relationally. 🧠

Save this before your next session with a client who arrives in urgency.

#anxiety #survival #therapy #somatic #healing

Nothing boosts my confidence quite like hearing:

“I’ve talked to a few therapists, but I think you’re the one.”

Excuse me while I pretend to be professional for the next 30 seconds. 💅

#mentalhealthmatters #therapy #therapistsofinstagram #drake

Make the bid for connection.

Send the text.
Ask the question.
Tell them you miss them.
Invite them to coffee.
Let yourself be known.

You might get rejected.

You might also get exactly what you’ve been longing for.

Sometimes I think emotionally avoidant people treat rejection like it’s a life-threatening event instead of a very normal human experience.

Go get rejected. Live a little.

Not because rejection is fun, but because connection requires risk.

The goal isn’t to never feel disappointed.

The goal is to stop letting the fear of disappointment make all your decisions.

A surprising amount of healing happens when you stop waiting for people to magically read your mind and start giving them the opportunity to show up for you. 🤍

#recoveringavoidant #healingjourney #attachment #therapy

Hot take: “Just tell me what to do” is rarely a decision-making moment. It’s a nervous system moment.

When a client says this, urgency shows up fast in the room. And if we’re not tracking our own internal response, we can accidentally meet urgency with… more urgency. More advice. More direction. More stripping of the very autonomy we’re trying to build.

But clinically, something else is often happening underneath:
“I don’t want to feel the uncertainty of choosing.”
“I want relief from the tension of not knowing.”
“Please regulate this for me.”

And this is where the therapist’s nervous system matters just as much as the intervention.

Because we do have options in those moments—but not all of them are about answering the question.

Sometimes the most regulating move is slowing the frame:

* staying with the pause instead of filling it
* noticing the urgency without acting it out
* helping the client track sensation before solution
* widening tolerance for “I don’t know yet”

Not to withhold support. But to return agency to the client’s system, not just their cognition.

The work is not just what do I say next?
It’s what is being activated in me right now, and how might that be shaping what I’m about to offer?

Because autonomy isn’t built through perfect advice.
It’s built through the capacity to stay with uncertainty and still stay connected.

#healingjourney #advice #selfcompassion #therapistsofinstagram

Self-awareness is powerful… until it starts replacing honesty.
Not everything is a trigger. Not everything is a wound. Sometimes it’s just a pattern that keeps repeating.

Your feelings aren’t asking you to fix yourself — they’re asking you to pay attention.

The goal is to be curious and more honest about what’s actually happening.

#relationships #healing #honesty #therapy

The ones people almost never clock:
    •    Over-explaining. Preemptively defending yourself before anyone pushes back. That’s mobilization looking for an exit through words.
    •    Suddenly becoming very productive. Rage-cleaning, inbox-zeroing, reorganizing at 11pm. Forward movement as discharge.
    •    Performing wellness. Journaling, meditating, doing all the “right things” — rapidly, compulsively. Regulation as a strategy to avoid feeling the thing.
    •    Excessive research before a decision. Gathering more information than the decision actually requires. The nervous system buying time.
    •    Talking fast and not knowing you’re doing it. The words outpacing the thought. Nobody clocks this as anxiety — it reads as enthusiasm.
    •    Helping everyone around you. Fixing, advising, checking in. Mobilized energy that found a socially acceptable container.
    •    Rehearsing conversations that haven’t happened. Running the argument, the confrontation, the hard talk — on loop. The body preparing for a threat that may never arrive.
    •    Laughter at the wrong moment. Nervous laughter isn’t random — it’s a discharge attempt.
    •    Being “really good in a crisis.” Calm, clear, decisive under pressure — then falling apart when it’s over. The mobilization finally running out of a job.
    •    Sudden, intense hunger after a hard conversation. The body asking for resources after what it just registered as a threat.

#anxiety #nervoussystem #healing #somatic #therapy

Countertransference isn’t just a clinical concept to track and document — it’s a body event. The bracing before a certain client’s name. The exhaustion that arrives before they even speak. The part of you that wants to fix something that was never yours to fix.
We were trained to name it. Most of us weren’t taught how to actually metabolize it.

That’s what peer consultation through a somatic lens is for — not just “what do I do with this client,” but what is this client doing in me, and why.

If you’re carrying cases between sessions, running patterns you can’t quite see yet, or just need somewhere to bring the clinical confusion that lives below the level of language — that’s exactly the work I hold space for.

30 and 60 minute sessions available. link in bio. Fill out a questionnaire via website.
(peer consultation is not clinical supervision and does not count toward licensure requirements)

My therapist: “What feeling are you trying not to feel right now?”

Me, halfway through purchasing concert tickets because my AC stopped working:

👁️👄👁️

Respectfully, my nervous system experienced a minor inconvenience and opened 17 tabs looking for a solution.

Sometimes we’re not seeking pleasure.
We’re seeking relief from boredom, uncertainty, frustration, or discomfort.

The brain said, “Fix the feeling.”
The feeling was a 3/10 inconvenience.

Sometimes I’m the therapist helping people notice their avoidance patterns. Sometimes I’m the person heading to Goodwill because the WiFi went out for 30 seconds. Growth is not linear. 😌✨

#healingjourney #avoidance #sidequest

Somewhere between the detailed backstory, the side quest, the context for the context, and the perfectly reasonable explanation for everyone else’s behavior…

…we still haven’t talked about the part that hurt.

A lot of intelligent, self-aware people aren’t avoiding on purpose. They’ve just gotten really good at understanding their experiences without actually feeling them.

Sometimes therapy sounds less like “tell me more” and more like:

“Diva, are you okay? You’ve barely touched the thing we’re actually here to talk about.”

No judgment. Just a gentle invitation to move from analysis into experience.

#healingjourney #selfcompassion #therapistsofinstagram

When therapists think about countertransference, we often focus on thoughts, feelings, or clinical reactions.
But what if we also became curious about the nervous system? Sometimes the stuck point in a case isn’t in the client’s nervous system alone—it’s in the interaction between two nervous systems.

In consultation, I enjoy helping therapists explore what may be happening in their bodies as they sit with a particular client. Maybe you notice yourself bracing, feeling pulled to rescue, becoming exhausted after sessions, losing track of your thoughts, shutting down, or feeling unusually activated.

Rather than viewing these experiences as something to get rid of, Somatic Experiencing® invites us to become curious about them.
What is your nervous system responding to? What information might it be offering about the therapeutic relationship? How might your own activation be influencing the work?

By slowing down and tracking these responses, therapists can often gain a deeper understanding of both the client’s experience and their own.

Peer consultation is a space to think through challenging cases, explore countertransference, strengthen clinical skills, and develop greater trust in your clinical intuition. (It is not a substitute for supervision / doesn’t count towards licensure, but simply a consult that could offer space for reflection and support).

My consultation style blends case conceptualization with Somatic Experiencing® and IFS-informed perspectives, creating space for both professional growth and self-awareness.

Virtual consultation available nationwide.

Comment “Peer” and I’ll send you the inquiry form!

POV: you came to therapy for anxiety and I’ve said “slow down” 47 times before we’ve even gotten to the actual story.

My anxious, highly independent, intellectualizing clients:
💨 explain
💨 analyze
💨 justify
💨 connect 14 different dots
💨 answer the question they think I’m about to ask

Me:
“Okay. Slow down.”

30 seconds later

“Can we slow that down even more?”

Because sometimes the breakthrough isn’t in finding a better explanation. It’s in finally noticing what was happening in your body before your mind sprinted past it.

#anxiety #healingjourney #slowdown #therapy

✨ Accepting new therapy clients in Arizona & Virginia ✨

Whether you’re looking for ongoing therapy support or have a therapist you love and want additional help processing a specific experience/integrating the body more, I offer both.

Alongside individual therapy, I provide Somatic Integration Sessions for people who want focused support working through a particular event, life transition, relationship experience, or period of activation using Somatic Experiencing-informed approaches. These sessions can be a great fit if you’re already in therapy and want extra support helping your nervous system process and integrate what happened/big insights.

If you’re curious about working together, visit my website for more information or to schedule a consultation.

I’d love to connect. 💛

#therapy #somatic #integration #healing

I hear this a lot in different forms.

Someone will say, almost casually, “I’m probably overreacting,” and then describe something that is actually very precise.

A shift in tone that no one is acknowledging.
A pattern that keeps repeating but never gets named.
A feeling in their body that doesn’t match what they’re being told is happening.

And what stands out isn’t that they’re dramatic.

It’s that they noticed.

Most people don’t actually miss these things. They just learn not to trust their reading of them, especially if it creates tension.

So they learn to edit themselves in real time.

To soften what they saw.
To add disclaimers.
To step back from their own perception before anyone else can question it.

Over time, they start calling that “being dramatic.”

But what I usually see is something else.

A fairly accurate read of a dynamic, followed immediately by self-correction.

Healing isn’t about becoming less perceptive.

It’s about stopping that second move where you talk yourself out of what you already know you noticed.

You don’t need to be more certain.

You need to stop assuming you’re wrong just because it’s uncomfortable to be right.

#therapistsofinstagram #therapy #mentalhealthawareness #women

Because contrary to what social media might tell you, healing from people-pleasing isn’t about becoming tougher, caring less, or just “letting them.”

Most of the people I work with are already incredibly thoughtful.

The problem isn’t their kindness.

It’s that everyone else receives it before they do.

So instead of teaching people to become someone they’re not, I help them learn how to include themselves in the equation.

To notice when guilt is running the show.

To understand the fears underneath their people-pleasing instead of shaming themselves for it.

To tolerate the discomfort of disappointing others without abandoning themselves.

The goal isn’t to stop being kind.

The goal is to make sure your kindness finally reaches you, too.

If that sounds like the kind of healing you’re looking for, come hang out at @renaissancehealing_

It’s realizing that you don’t have to solve every uncomfortable feeling you have.

For years, I thought healing meant getting rid of anxiety, self-doubt, grief, uncertainty, loneliness, shame, and fear.

Then I became a therapist.

And what I’ve noticed is that the people who seem the most grounded aren’t the people who never experience those feelings.

They’re the people who don’t immediately go to war with them.

They don’t spend hours trying to figure out why they’re anxious.

They don’t treat every difficult emotion like an emergency.

They don’t assume something is wrong because something feels uncomfortable.

They trust that feelings can move through them without being fixed, analyzed, or acted on.

At some point, healing stopped looking like self-improvement and started looking like making a little more room for being human.

And honestly, that has been a much kinder way to live.

#healing #therapistsofinstagram #selfcompassion #nervoussystemhealing

One of the most common things I hear is:
“I’ve been in therapy for years. I’ve learned so much. Why do I still react this way?”

Usually, that’s not a sign that therapy isn’t working.
In fact, many people have already done incredible work developing insight and self-awareness.

The question becomes:
Has your nervous system had the opportunity to integrate what you’ve learned?

Somatic Experiencing isn’t about replacing talk therapy.
It’s about supporting a different layer of healing.
A layer that involves sensation, regulation, protective responses, and the body’s capacity to experience something new.

Many people find that somatic work alongside therapy helps bridge the gap between understanding a pattern and responding differently when that pattern gets activated.

Because sometimes the next step isn’t more insight.
It’s integration.
✨

#somatic #therapy #healing

Me listening to my client tell a hilarious story for 15 minutes:

😂😌☕️✨

Me when the story slowly turns into:

“I mean, it didn’t really bother me.”
“I just moved on.”
“It is what it is.”
“I don’t really get angry.”

👁️👄👁️

Sometimes the most emotionally avoidant parts don’t show up as shutting down. They show up as staying positive, staying busy, staying funny, and staying disconnected from what actually hurt.

The plot twist? Anger isn’t always explosive. Sometimes it’s the emotion that’s been working unpaid overtime behind people pleasing, over-functioning, and “being the bigger person.”

#therapy #healing #peoplepleasingrecovery #avoidance #mentalhealthhumor

From a somatic experiencing lens, change doesn’t start with pushing ourselves into something different. It starts with slowing down enough to notice what the body has already been signaling.

Often, what we call ‘stuck’ is actually a system that has adapted and is still operating from protection. When we can stay with the felt sense of what isn’t working without immediately fixing, escaping, or overriding it there’s more space for the nervous system to organize around new information.

Change becomes less about force and more about allowing what’s true in the present moment to be fully felt, tracked, and gently updated from within.

#change #healing #therapy #somatic

Writing again.

I think a lot of healing quietly asks us to grieve the lives, identities, relationships, timelines, and versions of ourselves we thought would feel certain by now.

Sometimes growth looks less like clarity and more like learning how to hold contradiction with tenderness: loving your life while mourning parts you’ll never live, feeling genuinely happy for others while still aching, realizing you belong to yourself even when it feels different than what you once imagined.

If you’ve been sitting in that in-between space lately, I see you.

I also want to make more room on this page for poetry, storytelling, and authentic writing because creative expression has always felt deeply connected to healing for me. Sometimes art says the things insight alone cannot.

#writing #grief #transition #therapy

Who has a session today!?!?

#therapistsofinstagram #mentalhealthmatters #therapy #nervoussystemhealing #selfcompassion

Some people read tarot.
I read the micro-pause before you answer, the stress burp, the shoulder brace, and the “I don’t know what I feel” followed immediately by a 14 minute TED Talk.

If you work with me, I’m probably gonna help your intellectualizing brain realize your body has been sending emails this whole time. ✨

#healingjourney #somatictherapy #nervoussystemhealing #therapistsofinstagram

A lot of people use “nervous system regulation” to mean “calm all the time,” but in somatic work it’s much closer to nervous system flexibility or adaptability.

A regulated nervous system isn’t one that never gets activated. It’s one that can move through different states without getting stuck there.

So healthy regulation actually includes the ability to:
• feel stress without collapse
• access anger without losing control
• rest without shutdown
• feel excitement without anxiety
• move between connection, protection, play, grief, focus, etc.

The nervous system is supposed to shift states depending on what life requires. Flexibility is what allows that movement.

Someone can look “calm” externally but actually be highly inhibited, shut down, overcontrolled, or disconnected from themselves. That’s not necessarily regulation. Sometimes it’s survival.

#somatic #somaticexperiencing #therapy #nervoussystemhealing #somatictherapy

Somewhere along the way, a lot of us in this work learned to track everyone else before we learned to notice ourselves.

To feel the shift in someone’s breath.
The tightening in their jaw.
The collapse.
The activation.
The nervous system in the room.

And the hard part is… when this work slowly stops becoming a skill we practice and starts becoming our entire identity.

Because that’s where burnout lives.

When every interaction feels like something to track.
When you can’t stop holding.
When rest starts feeling “unproductive.”
When you feel guilty for not being regulated, available, insightful, or compassionate all the time.

Therapy is a skill set.
Attunement is a skill set.
Holding space is a skill set.

Beautiful ones. Meaningful ones.

But you are still a human underneath all of it.
A person with needs, limits, desire, grief, exhaustion, humor, avoidance, tenderness, and a nervous system that deserves care too.

You do not have to become the container in every room you enter.

#therapy #therapistsofinstagram #healing #mentalhealthmatters

A lot of healing starts before self love.

Sometimes the first shift is simply learning how to be honest with yourself without humiliating yourself in the process.

#selfrespect #selfcompassion #healingjourney #therapistsofinstagram

My client: ‘I don’t really think I have anger.’
Me: ‘Okay, but what happens in your body when someone crosses your boundaries?’
My client 4 minutes later punching a pillow, swearing, and discovering they’ve actually been holding tension in their jaw, chest, stomach, and shoulders since 2009.

A lot of people think anger is just yelling.
But somatically, anger is often the body’s blocked protective energy finally getting permission to move instead of staying trapped as anxiety, shutdown, tension, people pleasing, or overthinking.

#anger #nervoussystemhealing #therapistsofinstagram #healingjourney

Therapists know there’s a very specific point in the weather transition where clients collectively decide:
‘Actually… I think sitting outside might heal me.’ ☀️😭

Pls cancel accordingly !!!!!

#therapistsofinstagram #mentalhealthmatters #selfcompassion #therapistlife #humor

Anxious attachment doesn’t always look clingy.
Sometimes it looks like lowkey parenting your partner. 😭

Micromanaging. Overhelping. Monitoring moods. Reminding, fixing, anticipating, emotionally supervising, trying to prevent every possible rupture before it happens.

Not because you’re evil or controlling in some mastermind way, but because your nervous system learned:
‘If I stay hyperaware and overfunction, I can keep the connection safe.’

So healthy relationships can feel strangely uncomfortable at first because nobody needs to be managed. Nobody needs a behavioral improvement plan. Nobody is making you earn stability through constant emotional labor.

And suddenly you’re just sitting there like:
…so I’m supposed to date them, not raise them?

#anxious #attachmentstyle #healingjourney #peoplepleasing

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