TISHA'S EXPERIENCE

Hi, I’m Tisha Shull (pronounced Tee-sha.) I’m a licensed psychotherapist, educator, and consultant with more than 16 years of clinical experience working with trauma, anxiety, relationships, and the ways our histories continue to live in the body and shape our present lives.

My clinical work is primarily with adults who have experienced complex, developmental, attachment, or sexual trauma, as well as people struggling with anxiety, chronic self-criticism, relationship difficulties, emotional disconnection, or patterns that feel difficult to change despite considerable insight and self-awareness.

My approach to therapy begins with the understanding that symptoms and protective patterns usually make sense in context.  Rather than treating these responses as problems to be eliminated, I am interested in understanding how they developed and what they are protecting.

My primary clinical framework is Internal Family Systems (IFS), integrated with somatic psychotherapy, trauma theory, attachment work, and cranial sacral therapy. IFS offers a particularly respectful way of working with the complexity of human experience.

Working with me is collaborative and experiential. At times we may talk directly about your history, relationships, or present circumstances. At other times we may slow down and attend more closely to your internal world through an IFS Session.  The aim is not simply to understand why you are the way you are, but to develop a different relationship with what you carry.

For me, effective trauma therapy includes both insight, witnessing from Self and embodiment. Experiences of threat, neglect, loss, or violation are not held only as memories or beliefs; they can also shape the nervous system, and our implicit expectations of other people. 

My style as a therapist is warm, direct, curious, and grounded. I am interested in depth, but I also value practicality. Therapy should help you understand yourself more fully while also increasing your ability to live, relate, make decisions, set boundaries, experience pleasure, and respond to the realities of your life with greater freedom.

Before becoming a psychotherapist, I worked for many years as a carpenter and tile mason and was involved in expanding opportunities for women and gender-diverse people in the trades. That part of my life continues to influence how I work. I tend to think in experiential rather than purely theoretical terms, and I respect the intelligence that comes from the body, from lived experience, and from learning how to work directly with difficult things.

Alongside my clinical practice, I am an IFS Institute Trainer and consultant and a Lead Instructor with the Integrative Psychology Institute. I teach and mentor therapists in Internal Family Systems, trauma treatment, parts-based psychology, and embodied approaches to psychotherapy. Teaching clinicians keeps me engaged with the evolving field of trauma treatment and continually asks me to examine both the strengths and limitations of the models I use.

I was born in the Virgin Islands, grew up in Vermont, and now live in Alaska. I am a rock climber, backcountry snowboarder, artist, and lifelong learner, and these experiences have contributed to my appreciation for resilience, not as toughness or the absence of vulnerability, but as the capacity to remain connected to ourselves while adapting, taking risks, recovering, and continuing to grow.

Ultimately, I see therapy as a process of becoming more fully available to your own life through Self understanding and acceptance.