antidote is a process that weaves together guided meditation, emotion mapping, memory tracing, inner child and shadow work.

Unlike traditional talk therapy, this work blends emotional processing, somatic awareness and meditation techniques. We don’t talk about your problems in your everyday life, we don’t get into your whole family history, you don’t need to explain why you felt how you felt when you felt it, to me, yourself or anyone else. The focus is the feeling: we use it to figure out why you keep repeating the patterns in your life that are keeping you stuck.

antidote is not about learning how to cope better; it’s about rewiring what makes you feel the need to cope in the first place.

Each antidote session is tripartite:

first, I explain the theme in order to set the stage,

second, I use guided meditation to help you relax, then talk you through various movements in order to evoke a target emotion in the body. Once we have triggered the emotion, I then ask a series of questions to help you uncover your first childhood experience with that emotion and the memory it created.

In the third and final part of the session, we discuss your experience and make sense of it from your current perspective. Following the session, I will send you personalized recommendations on how to integrate your experience and I’m available to you for any further questions you have, because the work really begins after you leave.

Yes. The word “trauma” comes from a Greek word meaning “wound” or “hurt.” What we uncover in antidote is rarely the troubling memories from the worst day of your life. Often, they are seemingly benign happenings that are significant for only one reason: it hurt. Something happened, you felt a novel emotion about it and no one was there to explain what happened or what it meant, and so you told yourself a story about it to make it make sense. That story has been playing in the background of your entire life, affecting the relationships you have, what you do, the way you react, the things you tell yourself, etc. What we do together is find that memory and re-examine it with a different perspective, re-write the story you told yourself about it, and then let it drift back into the past where it belongs. Bringing awareness to the pattern is the first step; continuing to do the hard work of changing your being is what allows you to break the pattern once and for all.

Not at all. antidote has nothing to do with religion, but we will talk about what beliefs have been handed to you from religion, either yours specifically or the general underlying judeo-christian values that dominant much of the collective’s sense of morality.

You don’t need to follow any specific belief system, nor am I asking you to abandon yours. Curiosity is enough.

Yes. This work can complement therapy or stand alone if therapy hasn’t worked for you in the past or if you’ve been reticent about even trying it out. I respect the decision to take medication: I myself have benefited from psychiatric drugs on several occasions in my life. Many clients come here to me wondering if meds are enough—or if there’s a deeper root cause to explore that the medication is masking. antidote is not a substitute for licensed mental health care, but it may help you reconnect with your own wisdom about what’s needed next.

antidote was initially designed to be completed in one hour sessions over the phone, once per week. However, I know what it feels like to finally be getting somewhere and be told “time’s up.” Therefore, like a psychic, I charge by the minute ($60/hour), so we can be sure to go hard and finish each topic in one session. This model also prevents me from ending up in long, circling conversations with clients who are used to really talking it out. antidote is not talk therapy: we have very specific work to do and certain tasks to accomplish. I find that this method best values both of our time and money.

antidote is ten sessions in total: the first, fear + death, is always free, as both my gift to the world and also a no-strings-attached way for you to try before you buy. The remaining nine sessions can be as close together as weekly or as far apart as monthly; if you are unable to commit to at least once per month, you are not ready for the level of commitment that this exploration requires.

The lessons from each session are best integrated with some education and homework; a subsequent session may not be scheduled without having completed the homework from the session prior. This is not to mimic school or serve as punishment: the homework is tailored specifically to you and designed to help you best implement practices to retain the benefit of what you have discovered about yourself. Homework can include self-regulation techniques, educational videos, journaling prompts, guided inner work, somatic practices, meditation techniques; whatever helps to seal the deal.

Immediately after a session, you can expect to feel a little worn out. Some people report being tired, emotionally drained; others report a sense of relief or lightness. It really depends on what comes up in session. I find the following few days feel a bit like coming off of psychedelics: a sort of fuzzy area where I’ve had real insights but it doesn’t quite feel concrete yet. Homework helps with the integration. Later on down the road, people tend to feel more emotionally regulated, less triggered by the world. There can be a bit of a “falling apart” process where things seem to be unraveling a bit: this usually means there’s a pretty big disconnect between the way you’ve been living and the way you’d actually like to be living.

In short, the results can feel like a mixed-bag. There is no instant gratification in this type of work; the effects may not be realized until later on down the road, when you look back and realize that antidote was just the catalyst to everything else that followed. But all people report gratitude for making sense of things they had no idea were still affecting them, and how those realizations shifted them toward the life they wanted to lead all along.

The minimum total cost is $540 for nine sessions ($60, one hour sessions). The maximum would be $1080 if each session ran for the longest time I will sit with someone (two hours per session). So the total cost is somewhere between those two. I charge based on the time between when you answer the phone until we hang up. Either way, it is far less than you and/or your insurance company will pay for traditional talk therapy and in my opinion, far more effective.

That said, I do believe this work should be accessible: if you find that $60 per hour presents a financial hardship or creates worry about how much time you can afford to spend on the phone, I offer a sliding scale and will do what I can to meet you where you are.