Allison Gasca-Backman (she/her)

Narrative Therapy focuses on investigating and rewriting the "stories" told to you about yourself and the world. These stories can be taught to us by the dominant culture or worldview, society, our families, our religions or cultures, and early life experiences. These stories make up our core beliefs and tell us that we are not good enough, that we are undeserving, that we are broken, or that we are worthless. In therapy, our job is to challenge those stories and teach ourselves different ones.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (or DBT) can be helpful for those of us who are wired to feel emotions very intensely and often act impulsively, or whose emotions can lead to a lot of relationship conflict and maladaptive behaviors. DBT provides us with concrete coping skills and ways to investigate our emotional response to certain scenarios. This can be helpful for individuals who struggle with disordered eating, self-injury, substance use, and suicidal thoughts.

EMDR is an evidence-based trauma treatment that also shows significant results for depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and other types of emotional distress. EMDR allows us to work with your nervous system to reprocess earlier life memories that have impacted how you orient to the world. I am trained in the Basic Level of EMDR through The Center for Excellence in EMDR Therapy and am happy to talk more about how this would look with your treatment plan.

As a person in a larger body, I have first-hand experience of how bodies and identities become politicized and marginalized, and how disconnecting from our bodies can keep us numb to our emotions and in a state of trauma response. In sessions with me, your body will never be the problem, even when the rest of the world tells you that it is.

I am aware of the often negative impacts that the dominant White Supremacist worldview places on all of us, and I am attuned to the fact that society treats everyone differently based on their intersecting identities. I am comfortable discussing privilege and oppression and how these concepts differentially impact the therapy space, especially with regard to race, culture, body size, health/ability status, religion, sexuality, and gender identity.

Trauma work and Eating Disorders work is inherently grief work. While we are healing, we are in a constant state of grieving- grieving the things that happened to us that should not have, and grieving the things that didn't happen to us that should have. In our work together, we will make space for the pain and grief that comes with realizing that you have been suffering for a long, long time.