Melissa Shore LCSW
MEET MELISSA
MEET MELISSA
I offer myself as a ‘healing nurturer’—one who listens, reflects, and encourages you as you deepen and emerge a more whole, serene, and integrated being.
Founder of Shore Up Wellness.
My mission is to offer you a safe haven as you find your voice, strength, and inner wisdom at your own pace, then scaffold you from a secure base as you launch on your path and listen to your inner guide.
Master of Social Work (clinical concentration), Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA
Masters-Level Applied Forensic Psychology Certificate, The Chicago School of Professional Psychology
Early Childhood Education Degree Certificate, Merritt College, Oakland, CA
Dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Anthropology and Sociology, Mills College at Northeastern University Affiliated courses at: University of California, Berkeley, California Columbia University, New York, New York Arcadia University, Soviet/Eastern European Studies, Vienna, Austria
Expertise
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Crisis and suffering provide opportunities to awaken extraordinary capacities that otherwise might lie dormant, unknown and untapped. The AEDP model is about experientially making the most of these opportunities for both trauma processing and healing transformation. Key to the therapeutic action of AEDP is the undoing of aloneness and thus, the co-creation of a therapeutic relationship experienced as both safe haven and secure base where transformational healing can occur.
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AF-EMDR is client-centered and emphasizes a reparative therapeutic relationship using a combination of Resource Tapping (Parnell, 2008) to strengthen clients, EMDR to process traumas and talk therapy to help integrate the information from EMDR sessions and to provide healing derived from therapist-client interactions.
Traditional EMDR is often used for later traumas that occurred at a specific time. By comparison, attachment-focused EMDR focuses on longer-standing trauma due to unhealthy coping mechanisms and/or neglectful early attachments.
Through attachment-focused EMDR, therapists focus more closely on events that occurred very early during the person’s life. These events, particularly if disruptive to the bond between a child and their primary caregiver, often shape our future lives through internalized coping mechanisms and unhealthy means of communicating and healing from pain.
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The Circle of Security® is an innovative intervention program designed to improve the developmental pathway of children and their parents.
Every child comes into the world seeking a secure relationship with her/his caregivers. The Circle of Security® program helps promote that security.
A secure attachment between child and caregiver is critical to a child’s current and future well being. University-based research has shown that secure children have increased empathy, greater self esteem, better relationships with parents and peers, enter school more ready to learn, and are able to handle their emotions better than their less secure peers.
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In Transformative Couples Therapy® :
The therapist seeks to uncover and activate the couple members’ natural impulses to connect and heal in promoting a healthy relationship.
In every session we deliberately create a sense of safety in which the experience of connection and love can spontaneously emerge.
The felt experience of love and valuing helps to enhance closeness and move the process of therapy forward.
In this atmosphere of safety, couples find new ways to approach their problems and differences, as well as life’s ongoing stress.
This is a discovery process that is collaborative and opens new paths and patterns that couples want to take home.
Couples often come into therapy feeling distant, hurt and frustrated. From the first session, the therapist helps the partners access and focus on the strengths that already exist in the relationship.
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IFS is a transformative tool that conceives of every human being as a system of protective and wounded inner parts led by a core Self. We believe the mind is naturally multiple and that is a good thing. Just like members of a family, inner parts are forced from their valuable states into extreme roles within us. Self is in everyone. It can’t be damaged. It knows how to heal.
IFS is frequently used as an evidence-based psychotherapy, helping people heal by accessing and healing their protective and wounded inner parts. IFS creates inner and outer connectedness by helping people first access their Self and, from that core, come to understand and heal their parts.
But IFS is much more than a non-pathologizing evidence-based psychotherapy to be used in a clinical setting. It is also a way of understanding personal and intimate relationships and stepping into life with the 8 Cs: confidence, calm, compassion, courage, creativity, clarity, curiosity, and connectedness.
APPROACH & STYLE
APPROACH & STYLE
My style is based on unconditional regard for who you are and all you may have experienced. I work from a place of authenticity and a lack of judgment and I am deeply committed to undoing aloneness.*
Using ideas that fit YOU and your needs at any given time, I utilize both the science and art of therapy--whether you are an individual, a parent, or a member of a couple or family.
I incorporate theories and protocols including AEDP™, Attachment-Focused EMDR, Internal Family Systems, Circle of Security®, Transformative Couples Therapy® AND the foundational elements of Attachment Theory, as well as contemporary psychodynamic and object relations theory.
I welcome all emotions and will sit with you as you ride the waves, then support you as you grow from them. I help you connect with your body and heart even if you don’t know what that is or how to get there. Because I believe healing involves the whole being: body, soul, and mind AS WELL AS feelings, thoughts, and actions.