Rose Hoffer Gittell, MHC-LP

Associate Mind-Body-Soul Clinician

Treatment focus

I support youth and adolescents, adults, couples and families. I support people experiencing worry, negative self image, and those looking to break free from beliefs and patterns that do not belong to them. I guide people through life transitions, grief, loss, and healing from all types of traumas that may impact their ability to trust and feel safe (relational, developmental, ancestral, and sexual traumas). I am particularly interested in supporting mothers and daughters to heal their relationships. Within the psychodynamic framework, I draw upon my training as a yoga teacher to help people regulate and re-embody through an array of meditation and yogic techniques. I support people to connect with their own innate wisdom and capacity to heal.

When it comes to working with youth and adolescents, my primary focus is supporting wellbeing, confidence, and success in the school setting.  My first career as a teacher has given me an in-depth knowledge of the academic sphere that, coupled with my clinical training, allows me to support students to realize their unique skills and capacities, so they may forge vibrant and generative paths forward.

I use a multicultural framework to work with a diverse group of people. I am particularly interested in working with people navigating cross-cultural experiences or cultural transitions. I also help clients to recognize the colonial systems of oppression that they and their ancestors have been brought up in which cultivates harm inside of bodies and toward others. 

Desiring to work with mind-body-soul integration is what drew me to psychotherapy, and I am thrilled to share my approach with you.

What sessions look like with me

I am a feeling-centered person who has navigated intellect-centered environments throughout my life and bring this working knowledge to each of my sessions. 

I aim to bring people into contact with the experience of their body in the present moment. I work with people to gradually expand their capacity to be with whatever feelings are present, to evoke compassion for those feelings, and to build resilience and range for holding the big, powerful emotions that give our individual and relational lives depth and meaning.  

When we feel safe in our bodies and our nervous systems are calibrated, we are free to dare in play and imagination – to explore otherness, the unanalyzable, and the uncontrollable. The hidden is brought into awareness and we are offered a new opportunity to have choice and reclaim our sense of agency and sovereignty. What follows is pleasure, flow, and choice.

As a Yoga teacher, I am sensitive to the ways that the body can store trauma, and can use mindfulness, embodiment, and experiential techniques within the talk therapy model. Yoga has taught me about the unity between mind, body, and spirit, and that everything we do influences these three aspects of life. 

Iris Desse says: “Ancient teachers taught that humans and their bodies are not machines: we are alive and conscious in all aspects. Everything we do, every movement of our muscles, has an influence on all our being.”

How my integrative approach wove together with the threads of many lineages

Prior to my training as a psychotherapist, I taught psychology at a high school in Richmond, California through the program Teach for America. In a sense, I feel I began to heal myself when I started teaching. My experiences have and continue to help me build deeper empathy and compassion, and I have found this bridge of empathetic and compassionate understanding to be transformational.

As a teacher, I learned to not take myself so seriously. The beginner’s mind that I exercised during this time is helpful as a therapist as well. I learned to listen to and integrate honest feedback, and that gave me freedom to be responsive to the ever-changing needs and moods of other people. I found a lightness and a playfulness in this. Although I take my role seriously, there is a certain joyful lightness that guides me through the endlessly shapeshifting, flowing, adaptive nature of working with other humans. Jung told us that paradox is our most powerful spiritual tool. In surrendering to the mystery of another human being and remaining curious, you can’t help but to love them. 

Throughout my time teaching, I was engaged in an education of my own as I became an adult. I read voraciously about both Eastern philosophy and Western psychology. I became a devoted Yoga practitioner and eventually teacher. When I studied at a Tantra Yoga and Expressive Arts Therapy program in Quito, Ecuador, I felt firsthand how trauma manifests somatically, and experienced for the first time a place where it was completely safe to express emotion. We spent long, frustrating hours working – with gentle persistence – into the tightest and most closed off corners of our physical and energetic bodies. Our teachers ranged from shamans who told us magical allegorical stories about our inner hero’s journey and educated us about plant medicine, to a Gestalt psychologist who engaged us in empty-chair role play, to a play therapist who helped us to create clay masks to represent our shadow selves then act them out with movement and sound. When I returned home to California, I continued this work with the guidance of an amazing therapist. 

These experiences have been a balancing force to my traditional psychodynamic clinical training at Northwestern University, where I completed my graduate studies.