Welcome

My name is Michelle F. Krezanoski and I am a California Board of Behavioral Sciences licensed psychotherapist (MFC #52664) with a Masters degree in Integral Counseling. Since 2008, I have worked with adults, teens and children in San Francisco, the South Bay area, and Santa Cruz.

I currently have a private practice in Santa Cruz where I work with individual adults in whatever life stage they are in. My clients are curious about everything that's made them who they are and interested in the vast potential of what they might become.

I collaborate with folks who are burning with questions, fascinated by the intricacies of their minds yet driven to reveal its untruths, those who are awkwardly caught between life transitions, and those who have survived trauma to access their inner resources.

I specialize in:

• Trauma: including relational, cultural and developmental trauma, as well as acute traumatic events

• Spiritual awakening support and integration

• Dreamwork

In addition, I’ve worked with:

The definition of trauma that informs my work not only includes what can occur in the aftermath of a terrible event, but also, much more commonly, what can happen when we experience something that is simply more than we can consciously bear.

The late psychoanalyst Paul Russell wrote that trauma is primarily “an injury to the capacity to feel.” Because of vulnerabilities at certain developmental times we are more prone to traumatic wounding at some ages or junctures than at others. Perhaps something needed is continuously missing from our environment or something we don’t need is consistently present. Or maybe in a crucial moment when something particularly alive within us unfurled, it was not allowed to exist.

When certain experiences go unacknowledged, contorted or denied by ourselves or those around us, we may be cut off (literally dis-associated) from ourselves. We can lose fluidity within our bodies and minds, and parts of ourselves can seem to vanish, yet also linger unbidden like ghosts. How we perceive ourselves and the world is not the same and we may become unwittingly alienated, like foreigners in a once-familiar land. Or maybe we’ve never really felt at home in our bodies to begin with for a multiplicity of reasons, personal and collective.

But when conditions are ripe, these exiled parts of ourselves will show up like bedraggled wanderers at our door because they mysteriously don’t give up or actually disappear. Actually, they populate our dreams each night like emissaries from the deep. After wrestling with all the ways we want to send them away, at some point we might begin welcoming them in. When we can fully feel and allow them, many traumatic injuries can transform in surprising ways. Having another person there to catalyze, lovingly witness, and experience what is arising within us in a new way— as opposed to being unconsciously compelled to relive the original wound, in the same old way by ourselves— is where the potential for healing in the therapeutic relationship resides.

In addition to providing psychotherapy for pressing issues, I facilitate depth work. This type of work appeals to those who want to develop themselves beyond adapting to the outer world, beyond successfully 'getting by.' This kind of journey takes as many forms as there are individuals. Working with one's nightly dreams is one way to receive guidance in this process, and one that I've found to be very rich.