About
Trust me – trauma is all-consuming.
I learned from the inside out that the body stores trauma. We release the painful emotional charge of that trauma by bringing it to consciousness with love, compassion, creativity, patience, and support.
My experience enables me to empathize with my clients’ experiences without judgment and to guide them on what can sometimes be a challenging but enriching path.
Our work will focus on rewriting your story from the inside out. Whether you had significant trauma or many little traumas and disappointments, quelling the impact of the past is hard.
As mentioned above, the emotional imprint of painful memories lives on in your body, sometimes causing confusing, volatile reactions to today’s stressors.
Healing from trauma is possible.
Your body also brilliantly holds the tools for healing. Like healing from skinned knees, pumping blood, or digesting food, your body can lead you back to emotional release and ease.
Together, we will harness those tools through therapeutic connection, active imagination, body-based mindfulness, authentic movement, and Gestalt techniques such as dream analysis.
We will also follow the lead of your spiritual self so that you can make meaning of the life you received, find your purpose, and extract the positive lessons of even your most difficult experiences.
You can rewrite your story so that it no longer holds you back but becomes the springboard to your best, most fulfilling life.
About Me
Therapy led me to a new beginning.
My journey to becoming a therapist started with my healing from the impact of childhood trauma. Discovering the path toward psychological and spiritual wholeness led me to a deep desire to share what I learned and to help others.
I followed that path and started a second career as a therapist. I left my earlier career as a tax attorney to explore somatic and other experiential psychotherapies, including authentic movement, Gestalt, and body-based mindfulness.
Being a therapist has brought tremendous meaning to my life.
My professional training is diverse.
I received a Bachelor of Business Administration from Baruch College, followed by a J.D. from Yale Law School. My Master’s Degree in Social Work is from NYU.
I also have received one year of post-graduate training in psychotherapy and spent another year of training in somatic therapy. Other training includes the following: Internal Family Systems, Trauma Systems Therapy, Shaking Medicine, Shamanic Psychotherapy, Authentic Movement, Developmental Somatic Psychotherapy, Hakomi, and A New View of Psychotherapy.
I have worked with adults and adolescents for the past ten years. My clients have overcome or learned to manage the impact of various issues such as PTSD, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, low self-esteem, and complicated grief.
In my free time…
I love to bike and hike and have explored many of the country’s great rail trails on my orange beach cruiser. I also study residential architecture and, just for fun, design houses that are unlikely ever to be built.
Publications
Lutjen, L., Silton, N.R., & Flannelly, K.J. (2011). Religion, Forgiveness, Hostility, and Health: A Structural Equation Analysis. Journal of Religion and Health, 51, 468-478.