Meredith Davey (they/them)

I have a deep personal interest in spirituality, and pursued some graduate studies in Comparative Religion at one point. I believe that accessing the point in you that feels the truth of yourself and the world, and integrating that into your life in a robust way, is a source of immense strength and healing. Maybe you're a science person, maybe you do yoga, maybe you're a catholic! I want to work with you to make therapy accommodate, center and celebrate your faith, in a way that's true to YOU.

I work with Internal Family Systems, somatic therapy, and narrative therapies with an anti-oppressive stance in the way I address trauma. Whether the trauma you experienced was a one-off event or a consistent thread of traumas in your life, I focus on working with you to create familiarity with a sense of safety in your body, building resources to ground in the moment, in order to manage triggered emotions while remaining in deep respect toward the parts of you that are still healing.

I am a queer, trans, kink, poly, neurodiversity and fat-liberation and antiracist affirming therapist. That means that I understand how there are real barriers for naturally developing a deep and abiding sense of worth when your body and being exists out of the bounds of what is considered correct or normal in this society and culture. Whether your identity is addressed in the small list above or not, I enjoy exploring and destroying both inner and external barriers to self love.

Somatic therapy is an incredible tool for therapy because in the history of therapy in the west, many interventions focus on the intellectual understanding of the life story instead of the feelings that the experience has left behind. Often, the stories leave behind persistent feelings of unsafety, which are not resolved by the mere telling of the story. Somatic therapy helps us to really settle into what's true in the body, and to help the body gently shift into an experience of safety.

Internal family systems is an innovative way to conceptualize the structure of the psyche as being many different "parts", which each originate in specific experiences or trauma. To address the feeling of being in two places, (I want to do this, but I also really don't) it can be helpful to recognize that there really are two perspectives at play. The IFS process functions essentially to help these parts to feel safe talking to each other and coming to an agreement in the present.

I have spent a lot of time in my life engaging with philosophy in order to gain perspective and insight on the experiences I have had in my own life. I enjoy accompanying people in the process of asking their own very big important questions, laboring toward an answer to those questions or simply sitting in the intensity of the unknown. I believe that making room for asking questions, even those that we can't answer, can be an incredible source of energy and strength for a person's life.