Psychotherapy & Holistic Counseling

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I am an Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapist with training and experience in somatic therapies, expanded awareness practices, tantra, shamanic healing, energy medicine, plant medicine, and biomedicine, particularly gut health and nutrition. I orient equally within scientific method and ancient healing traditions.

As a therapist, I see my job as helping you get to know yourself as deeply as possible so you can discover, and reconnect with, the immense well of capacity, curiosity, strength, equilibrium, and compassion which I believe is our deepest essence and truest nature.  My job is to help you get to know, and then be, who you actually already are.

I will invite you and guide you into deep awareness of your thoughts, emotions, felt experiences, gut sense, inner truth, and inner resources, including the teachings of your belief system and faith which offer you strength. You'll meet your flexibility, courage, intelligences, healed places, wounded places, and deepest emotional truths. All aspects of you and all that you've experienced — past, present, future, known, and unquantifiable — will be welcomed with curiosity and an open heart.

Along this journey, you will not only discover who you are, but also who you are not -- the labels others have put on you, the criticisms that have been leveled upon you, and the limiting beliefs that you had to learn, absorb, and hide behind for safety and belonging.

I will be very real and honest with you, and actively engaged in your process; I don't mostly nod and say “uh-huh.” We will probably laugh a lot -- humans can be ridiculous -- and I will probably feel things along with you.

Our work together can help you expand your abilities, reclaim and heal lost parts of yourself, gain the confidence to create the changes you want, and express more of who you truly are.

I work with teens, adults, couples, and occasionally with families. My practice welcomes people of all identities.

Ellen Santaniello has a BA in pre-medical Biology from Brown University (1986) and a Master of Arts and CAGS in Holistic Counseling from Salve Regina University (2010). She is licensed and insured as a mental health counselor in the State of Rhode Island.