Mary A. Dumlao, M.A., LCPC
Using the power of your mind to heal physically and emotionally
Medical Psychotherapy
provides you with options for addressing your mental and physical health. For some people, using a medication to treat anxiety and depression is their treatment of choice. They tolerate the medicine well and do not experience uncomfortable side effects such as weight gain or insomnia. However, for many people that don't do well with medication, they would like to treat their mental health or physical symptoms naturally or get to the root of the problem to eliminate their distress. Working together, I can help you learn to shift your nervous system patterns that create anxiety, depression, hopelessness or terror which in turn create digestive, cardiac, respiratory and immune system problems.
Trauma, emotional and physical can overwhelm the nervous system and create unhealthy behavioral patterns. If we are in a car accident, we may avoid the street where this happened in an effort to avoid feeling some of the same terror we experienced with the original event. If we were raised in a house with chaos, where a parent was mentally ill, sick or alcoholic, we may have learned to overeat or overdo for others to create a sense of control and calm. For many people food became associated with love.
While these patterns came about to help us manage our internal distress or feel connected, they may not always serve us later in life - they have outlived their usefulness but they remain. Why can't I say "no" to others or stop eating foods that I don't want to eat?" are statements I hear often.
We tend to think of stress as something outside of ourselves, rather than our pattern of reacting when our nervous system feels overwhelmed. Our nervous systems are designed to get activated and resettle. Undischarged traumatic energy interrupts this biological wisdom. Working together to discharge this trauma energy allows the nervous system to regain it's natural resiliency, thereby breaking old "stuck" patterns of behaving.
Why Mary Dumlao, LCPC?
When a traumatic event overwhelms the nervous system it is stored in bits and pieces in the brain and has somatic sensations that are stored and remembered in the body. Research has shown us that no amount of "talking" about your problems will reach all of this to shift it. Many people tell me they have spent years in psychothrapy only to continue to experience the same issues. They do yoga, exercise, eat better, and try to "think" differently about what bothers them, but with only small benefit. They are tired of working so hard to feel better. They can't stick to their health goals of eating properly or exercising. They can't stop themselves from reacting to the things that create stress for them no matter how hard they try.
How about instead of "working" to react differently, you could just shift your nervous system so it no longer got triggered by the same issues?
I can teach you tools, such as EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) that you can use on your own to change the way disturbance is stored in the nervous system, or we can work together using EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) or SE (Somatic Experiencing) to reduce your nervous sytem reactivity-for good.