Trudy Patterson

In the spirit of transparency, I have 12 years of experience in counseling instead of the 32 listed in my profile. I graduated in 1993 in New Mexico with my counseling degree and had a private practice for 10 years until deciding to move into the behavioral health and health plan corporate world until 2021. In 2023, Arizona accepted my license from NM due to changes in their rules and granted me a license to practice. I immersed myself in refreshing my knowledge with hours and hours of training materials and opened my current practice.

My years of practice and work in corporate America and my life experiences provide me an ability to join with clients that I wouldn't have if I had stayed only in the mental health field.

I am certified in treating Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in adults. I am trained in many different approaches to therapy, which I use as needed with my clients, but some of the more common ones are Attachment Theory, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Somatic Therapy, which is body centered, Experiential Therapy, Internal Family Systems and Emotionally Focused Therapy. I have a working knowledge of neuro-psychology and do a lot educating on how the brain works with trauma and healing.

I work with adult individuals and couples. When I work with couples I see each separately as individuals and together as a couple. This is how I was trained years ago, and it is extremely effective.

During sessions, you might start talking about feeling fear of spending money and will want to get all of your thoughts out, and at some point I might ask you to focus in on what you are experiencing in your body. From there, we will explore other times you may have felt this way and what the circumstances of that time were. There might be a particularly strong voice in you that criticizes you. We will invite them into the room, maybe ask them to sit in the chair next to you so you can fully experience them from a distance instead of inside your head. These are all different treatment approaches to help you begin to know and understand yourself and integrate with your history and your current experiences, so that you can get a better understanding of what is driving the fear, and how to respond to it.

We will do this together. I am right there with you, witnessing, feeling, validating your experiences.

Our first session will focus on getting to know you better, reviewing some of the information you provided in your intake forms and surveys and definitely working on tools you can use right away. We will begin to build a plan for what you want to focus on during our time together. The main goal of the first few sessions is for me to get to know you and help you to stabilize in your current circumstances. Developing trust in my abilities to help you is critical, and that is what I focus on throughout our time together.