Hi, I’m Garrison
I am a Marriage and Family Therapist Associate. I picked the path of MFT because I believe the most significant wounds we carry are rooted in our relationships - our families, mentors, closest friends, earliest loves, and the world around us. I feel strongly that having developed a view of myself as a relational being surrounded by a vibrant, awe-inspiring, painful, and deeply meaningful world has led me to more grace and understanding for myself and others. In my work as a therapist, I aim to help others sift through internal parts that feel stuck, broken, or calcified to revel in the fullness of their experience on this earth.
When I began my own journey in therapy, I walked into the first session with a mental checklist of my flaws, thinking that once I addressed each item systematically and thoroughly, I’d be done. What I uncovered blindsided me - old wounds that had their teeth in me deeper than any checklist could handle, patterns of behavior, belief, and emotion that kept me invested in unsatisfying and unhelpful stories about myself, family history repeating itself in my body. Strangely, opening the box of my own therapy felt satisfying, like I was finally saying out loud something that I had unconsciously recognized long ago.
Life can feel frustrating like this: opening the Russian Doll of our own problems to find another that looks exactly like it within. Spinning in circles inside our heads, using our brainpower to try and figure out what’s wrong, only to feel like a dog chasing its tail when no solution becomes apparent. Feeling helpless in the riptide of our confusing emotions and most important relationships. Good therapy helps to find a different way to take these internal journeys.
Why Petrichor?
What’s up with this ostentatious word, huh? I picked Petrichor because it’s like the way I do therapy (and I love metaphors). Petrichor is an elaborate, intellectual, specific word with no easy replacement. The definition of Petrichor - the scent produced when rain falls on dry soil - is sensory and evocative.
I am a thinker. I am happy to join you in exploration of patterns and meaning-making - tracking your family history, hearing the stories you tell about your life, tracing cause and effect. I believe all of these things are helpful and sometimes necessary in the process of therapeutic change.
But I know the most effective changes that happen in therapy happen on the level of feeling: when you get to be with the parts of you that are most wounded, and offer them the care and compassion they need. I want to be with you in that process.