Individual Therapy
Elena Ryabtseva, MS, LMHC, CGT
Psychotherapist, Educator,
Independent Scholar
I work with individuals wishing to create meaning, depth, and fulfillment in their lives and relationships, develop a healthy connection with their bodies, and learn to access and cultivate internal resources. Any “symptom” that creates pain, loss, or lack in our lives is the psyche’s invitation for a renewal.
First Session
Our initial session is an opportunity to get to know each other a bit. For you, it is an opportunity to get a sense of me and see if working together could be a good fit. For me, it is an opportunity to understand how you relate to and perceive yourself, your relationships, and your world. I offer you space and time to share with me what you are ready to share. I am interested in exploring your present situation and experience, your insight, what matters to you, and what you want to develop in yourself.
Here are a few questions to reflect on:
What is no longer working in your life and is up for renewal?
What in you is asking to be healed? Why now?
What do you feel nurtured by and what seems to drain your resources?
What do you want to learn? What do you want to unlearn?
What in your life feels alive and vibrant? What feels stale and deadened?
What are the traumas, nagging behaviors, limiting beliefs, painful memories that you are struggling to release?
How do you relate to your body?
What do you wish to create more of in your life?
Beyond the Individual
We all come from a long line of people who lived before us. Our personal histories are embedded in and emerge from a larger context of family, culture, its norms and systems, and the world with its ongoing turmoil. We are not separate, and what feels misaligned and dysfunctional in our personal lives often has roots that reach beyond the individual into the collective.
Research on intergenerational trauma and epigenetics shows that on a level of gene expression, we are shaped by at least three familial generations and a hundred years of recent history through trauma-induced familial belief systems, attachment patterns, and emotional regulation styles. A holistic approach to treatment involves going beyond the personal level of consideration.
“My life is a miracle and my body which lives is a miracle… I know that I cannot separate them, and call one superior and the other inferior, any more than I can say my sight is greater than my eyes.”
Embodiment
Body and mind are polarized in Western consciousness. In addition to working on emotional and cognitive levels, I help my patients develop access to their body-mind, a source of deeper, innate knowing, intuition, and creativity.
To support development of embodiment and embodied intelligence, I incorporate somatic awareness exercises, guided visualization, and alchemical active imagination into the therapeutic process. Embodied practice is a powerful adjunct to our personal growth and transformation. It helps us transform the energy of trauma and stress into healing, lack into a resource, and doing into being.
Embodied approach will allow you to:
Identify the unique needs of your nervous system
Gain awareness of attitudes and behaviors where you “double dip” under stress
Learn to regulate intense emotional states through breathwork and grounding
Learn to come out of fight, flight, freeze, or dissociation
Build a capacity to sense, experience, and tolerate bodily sensations and emotions
Understand Window of Tolerance model and learn to apply it on your own
Developing a healthy and contactful relationship with your body
Access deeper layers of material that is unavailable to cognitive understanding or memory
Trauma Treatment
In my clinical experience, past and/or ongoing traumas are often at the heart of the presenting “symptoms,” relational dissatisfaction, or lack of fulfillment in life. Trauma is also a systemic process, which means it needs to be addressed holistically. I approach the treatment of PTSD, childhood developmental trauma, and intergenerational trauma through integration of work with the embodiment and the nervous system, attachment patterns and relational beliefs, as well as the spiritual dimension.
Trauma treatment provides an opportunity to:
Develop a healthy and contactful relationship with your body
Learn to come out of fight, flight, freeze, or dissociation
Examine and transform limiting trauma-based beliefs
Explore trauma-based behavioral adaptations that no longer serve you
Process the impact of intergenerational trauma
Identify and explore patterns of traumatic attachment
Learn to access and cultivate internal resources
Process the impact of trauma on the spiritual aspect of your existence
Therapy for LGBTQIA+
Wherever you are in your proud journey - considering, freshly out, or living a well-established life within the LGBTQIA+ community. Finding a therapist who has developed a deep understanding of the ways in which sexuality and gender experiences are interwoven in addressing depression, anxiety, trauma/PTSD, and relational issues can make a significant difference.
Receive support in navigating the issues of the coming out process
Explore embodied experience beyond gender norms
Explore sexual orientation and fluidity
Navigate the issues specific to queer and alternative relationship structures and dynamics
Identify and examine internalized limiting beliefs about body, gender, and sexuality
Address intimacy issues and challenges
Reflect on experiences and issues related to alternative sexual practices
Work with internalized shame
Therapy for Therapists
Clinicians are faced with a task of holding otherness in reverie. It is no small task. As it often happens, being present to joys and sorrows of others in the intimacy of a clinical container can unearth material that can take the therapist by surprise. Commitment to psychic hygiene is an important self-regulating practice for a therapist, not unlike the pre-flight recommendation to secure our own oxygen mask before helping others.
In addition to working on your personal material, as a clinician, you can deepen your process:
Explore archetypal energies that call you into service and their shadows
Explore unconscious processes that result in a burn-out and/or burn-down
Learn to resource your nervous system
Increase awareness of your own personal energy field
Process difficult countertransferential material
Identify and explore ways you get “induced” by your clients
Learn to maintain healthy energetic and interpersonal boundaries
“Thou is more than It can ever know.”