Ana Montero specializes in sexual abuse survivorship, and has extensive experience assisting survivors heal and integrate fractured inner systems.
Trauma is a neurological event with profound impact in all levels of self. Trauma “stops time” and creates a “capsule” in the mind where the traumatic events continue to be played and re-played creating indefinite suffering, unless there is educated intervention. Ana Montero is skillful in working with survivors that host many selves (younger selves), to create a compassionate space where all can feel safe and understood in the present moment, where they belong. Individualized therapeutic plan is created to give a voice and freedom to inner selves that have been oppressed for too long. The correct therapy can bring many kinds of neurological integration, among them: bilateral, vertical, narrative and temporal integration. (This knowledge comes from the ground-breaking work of Dan Siegel’s Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation.) Integration means wonderful things! Among them: emotional balance and regulation, empathy, intuition, self-knowing awareness (insight), response flexibility (pause before acting), fear modulation, ethics.
Integration is the opposite of dissociation, a state of deep suffering where the person does not feel meshed with or anchored in the body and/or time and space. Dissociation has been described as the “greatest spiritual suffering in human experience”.
Ana also works from an anti-oppressive, intersectional feminist perspective which is vital in understanding self as a sexual abuse survivor as well as the social context where the abuse happened.
Ana Montero Psychotherapy & Trauma Healing 