Hi, I'm Shelly

Life had gotten so confusing.

Decades of corporate work - exhilarating, fast-paced, demanding. I got to do some really cool things and learned so much! Became a guru of problem solving, innovation process, and cross-boundary collaboration.  Guiding transformation from dissonance to brilliant solutions was fascinating. Yet increasingly, clients would say they want to collaborate and then not share information. Agree to an action and not follow through. Know they need to build trust and hijack the agenda.

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Home life got so messy.

I was increasingly aware of the internal conflict of what mattered to me as a mom and what I had to do for work so bills could get paid. My marriage fell apart. How could I be doing all the right things and yet things were going so poorly?! 

 

I was so confused...about people.

Completing a masters degree in marriage and family therapy was just what I needed. What I learned about dynamics and human development cleared up a lot of confusion about people. Yet also surfaced that not only was the measuring stick (DSM) questionable, the system was built on using standardized fixes to the things in the book. There was no part of the standard process that got to the root causes of the symptoms. I had worked with engineers long enough to understand that, when a pressure valve blows, it isn't because of the valve is faulty. It blows by design and the cause is somewhere below. And adding a human dynamics perspective highlighted we are often part of the cause that underlies someone else's valve blowing.

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Finally people made sense; the mental healthcare system did not.

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Doing my own restorative bodymind work helped me find peace with the system rather than jumping to my old protective pattern of over-responsibility to get everyone else to get it and change it! To the contrary, I found a path where I can do what I have to do for the system and model a different approach and be the change I want to create. Plus I'm free to be the problem-solving-so-you-can-restore kind of therapist that gets to the root of things.

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My goal is for our time together to be as short as possible. 

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Your time and money are better spent living. This does not mean rushed or hurried. We'll take time to understand the distress and contributions to it. Slowing down helps us find the contributions that are most likely to help you sustain the changes for the long term, not just until we meet next. 

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I put my passion for research to work for you.

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I'm a guide. A collaborator on resolving your distress. I pour through articles, books, meta-analyses every week, prompted by something a client is trying to resolve. I'm not looking for quick-fixes. I'm building an amazing model of how humans work. When we accept our complexity and drop the ideologies that contribute to distress, we can focus on the 20% of the root contributions that resolve the 80% of the distress and symptoms. It's in the nervous system of which the affect system and threat detection system are commonly in that 20%. 

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I can't do the work for you.

 

I'm a guide. A human that can help you hold stuff that's really big. A collaborator on resolving your distress. And it's your distress, your nervous system, your stuff. You are an amazing human who has been adapting to things all along. What you're experiencing now is a testament to your survivability! It just led to tangles and conflicts that you didn't know were happening. As you resolve the tangles and conflicts in your inner control system, you can find that harmonious rhythm on the inside and bring it to all of your living.