ABOUT ALLISON

I’VE BEEN INTERESTED IN WHAT HAPPENS BENEATH THE SURFACE FOR A VERY LONG TIME.

WHERE IT BEGAN

THE INSTINCT CAME BEFORE THE LANGUAGE.

When I was about ten, a classmate asked me to meet her at the park. Her parents were divorcing, and at the time divorce still carried a particular kind of stigma among children.

I remember knowing that she was hurting, even though I didn’t yet have the language for what she was experiencing or what I was sensing.

So I listened. I gave her a hug. And when I walked home afterwards, I remember feeling deeply moved that she had trusted me with something that mattered.

I wouldn’t have called it holding space then. I was ten.

But I recognize the instinct now, and it has followed me throughout my life.

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THE ROUTE HERE WASN’T PARTICULARLY LINEAR.

In 2009, I started a mobile massage practice. Something unexpected began happening almost immediately.

People talked.

As clients settled onto the table, they began telling me what was happening in their marriages, families, careers, and inner lives. Physical tension often arrived with an emotional story attached, and I became increasingly interested in the relationship between what we experience and what the body carries.

What began as massage gradually became something more layered. Clients came not only for physical relief, but because they valued the conversations and perspective that emerged alongside it.

I wanted to understand more.

That curiosity eventually led me further into the study of human behaviour, trauma, emotions, embodiment, and the nervous system.

For three years, I also worked full-time in Employee Assistance and crisis support, listening to people through distress, conflict, uncertainty, and overwhelm. It was an extraordinary education in how differently human beings respond when life becomes difficult, and how much can change when someone feels genuinely heard rather than managed.

Over time, the direction became unmistakable.

MY PRACTICE TODAY

FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE BECOME VERY GOOD AT FUNCTIONING.

I now work primarily with thoughtful, capable adults who have often become exceptionally good at functioning.

They can manage their careers, solve problems, anticipate what everybody else needs, and keep moving when things are difficult.

What they may have far less practice doing is hearing themselves.

Many learned, for very good reasons, to override feelings, accommodate other people, distrust their instincts, remain productive through exhaustion, or become the person who could handle everything.

Those patterns are intelligent adaptations.

Our work is about becoming curious about them rather than going to war with them.

I work primarily through Internal Family Systems, nervous-system-informed practice, Focusing, emotional and embodied awareness, and trauma-informed approaches.

But I don’t believe a person should have to learn my entire professional vocabulary in order to benefit from it.

The training matters because it gives me more ways to understand what may be happening.

The person in front of me matters more.

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MORE THAN INSIGHT

Many of the people who find their way to me already understand themselves remarkably well.

They’ve read the books. They’ve been to therapy. Maybe they can identify the childhood pattern, explain the attachment dynamic and probably tell me exactly why they react the way they do.

And still, something doesn’t change.

And, that makes sense.

Insight is enormously valuable, but understanding a pattern intellectually is not always the same thing as changing your relationship with it.

Sometimes the next layer of work happens somewhere quieter.

In the sensation that appears before the explanation, or the part of you that knows something is wrong while another part insists everything is fine.

Perhaps in the anger underneath accommodation and in the exhaustion underneath competence.

And maybe, in the moment you begin to notice that what you have spent years calling too sensitive, too much, lazy, difficult or needy may be carrying information you were never taught how to hear.

THIS IS THE TERRITORY THAT INTERESTS ME MOST.

Not becoming an improved version of yourself but becoming more fully yourself.

“Weekly work with Allison is the most important promise I make, and keep, to myself.”

“I have been working with Allison since 2023. When I began working with her, I had made a transatlantic move to frenetic New York City and entered the US academy as a Black woman, first-generation graduate and child of immigrants, and assistant professor at an Ivy League institution. My nerves were already frayed from the PhD process, visa struggles and the pandemic. I had just got married, and I was moving from a culture that prized modesty and fitting in to one that prized boldness and standing out. Navigating the particular forms of racism that come with every new place and institution was, and remains, difficult.

Since then, I have navigated fertility challenges, changes in my marriage and work life, leadership, and perimenopause. Through all of it, my weekly work with Allison has been the single most crucial element of my thriving despite the pressures of life, and I say that without exaggeration.

Friends have told me they see Western therapy as a band-aid that simply enables us to keep working at all costs, without stopping. I will say to you what I say to them: I have had that kind of therapy. This is not that.

Allison has helped me to be in community better; to give to my friends without depletion and to regain genuine joy in being there for my family. This is not work that replaces interdependence. It supports true and healthy interdependence.

Allison’s compassionate support and her unique blend of modalities have helped me access parts of myself that I thought were lost forever beneath the weight of everyone else’s expectations. Her way of listening, identifying the parts of me that are stuck, and helping me to integrate and befriend all parts of myself is incredibly effective. She has helped me in my fertility journey, my marriage, my work life, my leadership journey and my journey into perimenopause.

Allison once said to me, “The systems that you write about and which affect you daily are the waves that threaten to engulf you. I am here to strengthen your core, so you don’t succumb to the waves. I am here to help you surf.”

That has stayed with me.

Allison’s work has helped me not only to grow into my various roles, but also into the Self that supersedes any role and can handle anything, not without struggle, but with genuine support and self-trust. It is an ongoing journey.

Weekly work with Allison is the most important promise I make, and keep, to myself. I am forever grateful.”

A.
Academic, USA

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IN THE ROOM

THE WORK IS SERIOUS. WE DON’T HAVE TO BE SERIOUS EVERY MINUTE.

There is room in my practice for grief, anger, shame, fear, and the things that have never been easy to say aloud.

There is also room for irreverence, laughter, and the absurdity of being human.

I am warm, direct, and deeply engaged in the work. I will listen carefully, notice patterns, ask questions, offer perspective, and sometimes challenge an assumption that deserves challenging.

I’m not interested in positioning myself as the person who knows your life better than you do.

One of the central aims of this work is quite the opposite.

I want you to become increasingly able to recognize your own signals, understand your internal world, and trust the information coming from within it.

THE RELATIONSHIP YOU ARE BUILDING IS ULTIMATELY THE ONE YOU HAVE WITH YOURSELF.

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A PRACTICE SHAPED BY CURIOSITY

I have been studying people, healing, and human experience in one form or another for much of my adult life, and I expect I always will.

My formal training includes Level 2 training through the IFS Institute, the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model, Focusing, complex trauma, EMDR-informed study, DBT, ACT, embodiment, and other approaches that help me understand a person from more than one angle. I have also received the Focusing Partnership Award, and my earlier professional training includes certification as an Empowerment Coach through the American Association of Drugless Practitioners.

Before my practice evolved into the work I do today, I spent years working with the body through massage and trained to Reiki Master Teacher, Level 3. Those earlier experiences deepened my understanding of the ways people experience themselves beyond cognition alone, and of how emotion, history, sensation, and the nervous system can intersect.

My professional experience has also included three years working full-time within an Employee Assistance and crisis-support service, listening to people through distress, uncertainty, conflict, and overwhelm. That work reinforced something I had already begun to understand: how differently human beings respond when life becomes difficult, and how much can change when someone feels genuinely heard rather than managed.

I continue to study because I don’t believe complex human beings are best served by one rigid framework.

The training matters. It gives me more ways to understand what may be happening.

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I’ve spent much of my life following that question, and it remains at the centre of my work today.

THE QUESTION I KEEP FOLLOWING

What becomes possible when someone feels safe enough to tell the truth about what is happening inside them?

ARRANGE AN INTRODUCTORY CALL

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