Guiding You Toward
Healing and Connection
Offering Individual and Couples Therapy for Over 20 Years
Your Journey Starts Here
Navigating therapy options is your courageous first step toward implementing change in your life. Seeking help is courageous because you are making a conscious effort to address your way of being. You realize that what you have been doing is not working for you anymore, and that you want to manage yourself differently. Changing or “undoing” old behavioral patterns takes time and effort, as you have been rehearsing them for most of your life. For this reason, finding a therapist with whom you connect is as important as the therapy itself.
Individual and Couples Therapy
Individual Therapy
Individual therapy is a sacred space to deepen your self-awareness, feel heard without judgment, and uncover patterns that no longer serve you. Whether you’re navigating anxiety, trauma, grief, or difficult life cycle transitions, therapy offers a compassionate invitation to turn inward. Together, we explore how your attachment history—the ways you learned to love, cope, defend, and adapt—still influences your relationships and emotional world today. Through a psychodynamic lens, we uncover the unconscious stories and strategies that formed long ago but continue to echo through your daily life. From an existential perspective, therapy becomes a space to ask the deeper questions: Who am I, really? What do I long for? What brings meaning to my life—especially in the face of uncertainty or pain? Alongside these reflective practices, we learn to challenge negative thought patterns and recognize where these thoughts and feelings settle in our bodies.
Couples Therapy
Couples therapy is a space to slow down and really listen—to ourselves and to each other. Most of us enter relationships carrying unspoken expectations and old patterns shaped by past relationships, old attachment wounds, and cultural narratives. Over time, these can lead to misattunement, resentment, or a sense of emotional distance. In our work together, we explore these stuck places with compassion and honesty—not to assign blame, but to better understand what’s being protected beneath the conflict. Drawing from the Gottman Method, we learn practical tools for improving communication, repairing after rupture, and building emotional safety. We also examine how intimacy, desire, and identity evolve in long-term partnerships—and how to cultivate curiosity even when things feel stuck.
In addition to traditional talk-therapy, I offer the following trauma-informed modalities in-person and virtually:
EMDR
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing
Traumatic experiences live both in memory and muscle. When experiences are too difficult for us to fully process at the time, our bodies store the experiences for later. EMDR is an evidence-based, body-informed therapeutic approach designed to help us gently return to these unfinished memories, and complete the cycle of healing.
Through the use of bilateral stimulation-eye movements, alternating tappers, or audio tones- we revisit emotionally-charged memories in a safe, structured way. The bilateral stimulation engages the brain’s innate ability to process and release stored emotional material. What once felt sharp or unbearable begins to feel distant, less reactive, and less charged.
KAP
Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy
Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) offers a legal, safe, evidenced-based approach to accessing deeper layers of the psyche.
How It Works In the Brain:
*Ketamine briefly blocks NMDA receptors, leading to a surge in glutamate, thereby stimulating AMPA receptors.
*This process increases BDNF-brain-derived neurotropic factor.
* Within hours, ketamine promotes dendritic growth and spine formation in the prefrontal cortex, repairing circuits impacted by trauma, depresson, and chronic stress.
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Studies suggest that this increased neuroplasticity, or “neuroplastic window,” remains open for 1-2 weeks following the ketamine dosing, thus augmenting our receptivity to learning, re-patterning, and integration of new narratives.
Ketamine acts as a catalyst, supporting insight, emotional release, and connection to parts of self that are often exiled or buried.
I partner with Journey Clinical, who handles all medical aspects of your ketamine treatment, and I take on the psychotherapy portion of the experience.
KAP + EMDR
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing
Combining EMDR and KAP is an elegant way to access deeper material that is creating blocks in the system. There are two approaches:
Approach 1. Using a psycholytic dose, or low-dose ketamine, allows for the client to work through the traditional EMDR protocol with more ease. The dual focus of visiting the emotionally-charged memories while externally tracking the bilateral stimulation allows the brain to revisit trauma without becoming overwhelmed. The low-dose Ketamine added to this process allows for the client to experience deep physical relaxation while bringing up difficult content, in turn teaching the body and nervous system to feel more relaxed around this traumatic content.
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Approach 2. The client will go through the EMDR protocol before and after the psychedelic dosing session, but not on the same day. The psychedelic dosing session may elicit profound insights for the client to process with this therapist 1-3 days after the session, while still within the neuroplastic window. Bilateral stimulation will be used during these integration sessions to further process the revealed content.
MEET MEENA
Hi I'm Meena Dershin, LPC
I am an inclusive and trauma-informed therapist with roots in existential therapy and evolutionary psychology.
My therapeutic approach integrates traditional psychoanalytic psychotherapy with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Emotion Regulation practices, Mindfulness, aspects of Internal Family Systems, and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy to offer a highly personalized approach tailored to each client. I am EMDRIA-trained in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), an effective and evidence-based treatment for PTSD and traumatic experience. I have also received training by Fluence to provide Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy both in person and virtually.
How We’ll Work Together
Therapy isn’t about fixing you—it’s about getting to know your story, identifying what’s been holding you back, and learning how to move forward with intention. Here’s what our work might look like:
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I will get to know your story, your attachment wounds, and patterns. We will work on building a strong and trusting therapeutic alliance, learn basic tools like assertive communication and boundary-setting. We’ll seek out stubborn thoughts, patterns, or traumas that are difficult to get to or heal. For some, EMDR or Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (or both) might be appropriate modalities for getting through to these parts..
The process of therapy gets deeper with time. Gestalt therapist Fritz Perls writes about peeling back the layers of an onion to reach one’s authentic, vital core; and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that we must strip away layers of convention and illusion, or cultural “skins,” to reveal our authentic self. When we show up to do the therapeutic work, we learn our motivations, intentions, and defenses. We are reminded to practice self- care and manage our nervous systems, making us better partners, friends, spouses, parents, family members, employees/employers.
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Working toward healing, integration, and freeing up the Self requires time, trust, patience, and practice! We must learn to trust the process and rehearse new learned skills in order to solidify and create change. We truly are our habits. We are what we practice.
Reconnect. Repair. Grow Together
Strengthen your relationship—book a session now.
