For the movers, messy processors, big reactors, rage feelers, and reconnecting
Mari mari, hello!Outside of the therapy room
Contrary to popular belief, therapists do occasionally log off and become regular people again.
Outside of work, you can usually find me at a concert, in queer ballroom spaces (category faves: FACE, performance, and runway forever), building playlists with wildly specific emotional categories, beadworking for hours, or at a pow wow making a direct path toward the frybread and earrings I absolutely do need, actually. I’m also a transracial and transnational adoptee reconnecting with my family, parts of my history, culture, and community that were separated from us early on. Working alongside Native elders and community here in Colorado has healed parts of my heart in ways that deeply shaped both my life and my work. Part of my story also includes growing up in relationship to systems and institutions where adults, documentation, and professional narratives often carried more authority than children’s lived experiences did. Because of that, I think carefully about power, consent, boundaries, and the ethics of the therapy relationship itself. I do not believe strong clinical boundaries require therapists to perform neutrality, emotional distance, or disconnection from their own humanity. If anything, I think ethical practice requires deeper self awareness, accountability, transparency, and an honest understanding that therapists are shaped by culture, systems, identity, and lived experience too. Clients deserve room to thoughtfully consider who they want sitting across from them, especially in professions where “professionalism” has historically been conflated with emotional detachment rather than relational integrity.
A lot of what restores and shapes me lives in community, movement, music, humor, beadwork, food, and collective care. The breakup playlist. The aunties feeding everyone. The friend carrying emotional support snacks at all times. The side eye across the room. The dancing that starts once people feel safe enough to stop performing coolness. None of that feels separate from healing to me. I’m also not especially interested in therapists pretending they exist outside of real life or community. Depending on the spaces you move through, there is always a chance we run into each other in the wild. If that happens, no worries. I’ll likely be deeply committed to the music, my friends and elders, dancing, beadwork, the food line, or convincing myself I absolutely needed another pair of earrings. Boundaries and confidentiality will always be important to me, but so is remembering that healing happens in relationship to actual living, breathing community too.
Hey, I’m Bri! I’m a dance and movement therapist, which honestly means a surprising amount of my work involves helping people remember they are not just a floating brain dragging a stressed out body behind it all day. A lot of us have spent years being rewarded for disconnecting from ourselves. Pushing through exhaustion. Staying productive while emotionally imploding a little. Smiling while our jaw is clenched to the point of evolutionarily concerning levels. Existing almost entirely from the neck up because slowing down long enough to actually notice what is happening internally has not always felt safe, accessible, or practical. I’m interested in what happens when we stop treating those responses like individual failures and start understanding them as intelligent adaptations to the environments, relationships, expectations, and pressures people have had to survive.
A lot of people hear “dance therapy” and picture choreography, performance, or being watched while they awkwardly freestyle in a room. Thankfully, that is not what this is. Dance and movement therapy can look like pacing while talking, stretching between thoughts, sitting on the floor, noticing when your shoulders rise toward your ears, blasting music after a hard week, shaking out stress, experimenting with posture and space, or realizing you have been holding your breath for the last twenty minutes. Sometimes movement communicates something long before language fully arrives. I work with many teens and adults who feel emotionally intense, physically restless, chronically overwhelmed, disconnected from themselves, or exhausted by the pressure to remain composed, agreeable, productive, and easy to understand at all times. Especially for people navigating trauma, neurodivergence, racialized stress, gendered expectations, hypervisibility, chronic self monitoring, disability, or environments where safety depended on reading the room correctly, direct verbal processing is not always the easiest place to begin. The body often notices first, reacts first, and protects first.
Honestly, “I don’t know” is one of my favorite responses in therapy!
Not because I think people are confused or avoidant, but because “I don’t know” is often incredibly intelligent. Many people learned very early that not knowing the “right” answer could lead to shame, punishment, dismissal, conflict, humiliation, or being told what they supposedly felt before they had space to understand it themselves. Over time, people become incredibly skilled at monitoring themselves, performing clarity, staying agreeable, or saying something acceptable before they have actually had the chance to feel what is true. So I do not expect every feeling to arrive fully formed and perfectly articulated five minutes after meeting me. Sometimes emotions are vague. Physical. Contradictory. Loud. Numb. Zingy. Hard to translate. Sometimes there are no words yet, only sensations, impulses, images, exhaustion, irritation, movement, or the feeling that something inside is asking not to be pushed. Especially when we are working with younger parts of ourselves, it makes sense that trust may not immediately sound like disclosure. Sometimes it sounds like “I don’t know.” Sometimes it looks like changing the subject, joking first, shrugging, pacing the room, avoiding eye contact, or needing me to stop looking directly at you for a second while you figure out what is happening internally.
I do not see those moments as resistance or failure. I see them as communication and boundaries! As the body checking whether it is safe enough to stay present.
Because of that, I care deeply about pacing, consent, and autonomy in the therapy relationship. Whether we work together for two sessions or two years, your boundaries with me matter. You are allowed to move slowly. You are allowed to not have language yet. You are allowed to realize your body knows something before your mind catches up to it. I’m much less interested in forcing immediate insight than I am in helping people build enough safety, curiosity, and self trust to stay connected to themselves while meaning unfolds over time. In our work together, we might explore emotional expression, anger, shutdown, boundaries, identity, grief, burnout, self trust, relationships, creativity, or what it feels like to exist in a body that has spent years adapting to pressure. I care much more about honesty, experimentation, curiosity, and embodied self awareness than performing healing “correctly.” You do not need rhythm, coordination, flexibility, dance experience, or a particular relationship to movement to belong here.
My hope is to create a space that feels grounding, collaborative, emotionally honest, playful, and deeply human. A space where people can move, react, pause, process, take up space, and reconnect with themselves without needing to shrink, over explain, or earn their humanity first.
Education & Training