Krista Regedanz, Ph.D.

Psychologist PSY23220

Krista Regedanz, Ph.D.

Psychologist PSY23220

Krista Regedanz, Ph.D.

Krista Regedanz, Ph.D. specializes in helping with:

  • Anxiety
  • Job Burnout prevention and recovery
  • Work-life balance for achievement-oriented people in Silicon Valley
  • Grief
  • Trauma (accidents and tragedies, as well as childhood trauma and neglect)

People usually call Dr. Regedanz when they:

  • Want to balance their professional drive with an authentic experience of living
  • Feel trapped in their position as a leader/wage earner/founder/expert
  • Want to experience their professional drive in a more meaningful, sustainable form
  • Are ready to grow beyond a pattern that gets in their way but don’t know how
  • Have their first panic attack(s)
  • Are going through a life-altering event (or someone close to them is) causing them to question the fundamental way they view the world
  • Sometimes feel alone or isolated in their leadership roles
  • Want more control over their reactions and when and how they accomplish tasks
  • Would love to feel more at ease and comfortable in their own skin without having to second guess themselves
  • Want to change their brain to functional optimally in their current reality
  • Want to work with an EMDR-certified, IFS, somatically trained psychologist

Dr. Regedanz’s approach as a therapist is active. Working with Dr. Regedanz can look more like coaching than like seeing the stereotypical “just listening” therapist. Her clients actively work to change problematic brain patterning, develop strategies to meet challenges and to hone their strengths. Dr. Regedanz’s often involves a four interactive phases:

  1. Objective design.  Dr. Regedanz and her clients develop a list of goals and priorities to work toward as informed by the client’s history, current aspirations and challenges, and the results clients are want to achieve.
  2. Plan creation.  Dr. Regedanz creates a targeted treatment plan for her clients. This personalized plan evolves during the course of therapy dependent on data gathered from exploration and experimentation feedback.
  3. Plan execution  Dr. Regedanz and clients complete tasks for symptom relief and neuronal recoding that often include:
    • Increasing internal and external resources for initial symptom relief. This involves educating clients about sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system triggering and the difference between explicit and implicit memory with the goal of developing resources to increase nervous system balance and widen the client’s window of emotional tolerance.
    • Gathering data on the triggers associated with nervous system imbalance and affect tolerance challenges.
    • Utilize therapeutic techniques to create new, functional neural connections and to desensitize and extinguish old, dysfunctional neural connections keeping her clients stuck. Dr. Regedanz uses a number of techniques including Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR), Internal Family Systems (IFS), Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Humanistic-Existential Psychotherapy, CBT and Mindfulness.
  4. Integration.  In this phase, clients realize the accomplishment of goals and report recapturing or discovering new energy and meaning.

Dr. Regedanz’s goal is to help her clients move as quickly as they are able through the therapeutic process. For those who have the bandwidth, weekly homework can be assigned to move the process along more quickly.

Dr. Regedanz has the rare ability to explain both the emotional and the scientific/intellectual reasons for what’s happening to her clients, the personal and clinical experience to understand where Silicon Valley professionals are vulnerable, and the intensity to partner with her high achieving clients. Her clients report they feel less alone. They often express relief that she is a warm, real person who has the experience and education to help them move forward.

Dr. Regedanz clients’ goals are the focus of therapy. Therapy is complete when her clients’ goals are accomplished. This usually accompanies Dr. Regedanz’s clients reporting feeling more alive, having a sense of mastery with the choices and responsibilities they encounter, being closer to the people they care about, and experiencing more meaning and direction in their lives.

Dr. Regedanz specializes in working with people who identify themselves as Type A and achievement oriented partly because she has Type A traits herself. She remembers what it was like to secretly feel something wasn’t right when her life became one she thought she wanted. She remembers the guilt that went along with that feeling because she had nothing to complain about. She remembers the personal isolation and the importance of impression management when she couldn’t tell anyone how low she was. Dr. Regedanz believes one of the most courageous things a person with Type A tendencies can do is try therapy. Ultimately, therapy should help clients own their lives and experience a sense of freedom of decision, expression and authenticity that is often illusive for driven, achievement-oriented people.

It can be maddening when despite everything you’ve accomplished, you can’t enjoy your life. The last thing you want is a therapist who looks at your life and thinks to themselves that you “should” be happy or “balanced.” Dr. Regedanz knows what it’s like to be overextended, to never be able to relax. She has had periods of overwhelm, anxiety, perfectionism and accompanying guilt through her own life, and has had the great fortune of conducting her own clinical research on job burnout and of gaining expertise from working with high achieving people in Silicon Valley. She knows the skills and knowledge one needs to make drive and accomplishment into an ally and co-conspirator rather than a life-sucking monster.

Background

Twenty years ago, Dr. Regedanz was a technology consultant at a data warehousing and business strategy firm based in Chicago and Boston working with strategy and knowledge management. She liked a lot of things about her job: working with intelligent, committed people on hard problems, presenting solutions to those problems, and the compensation. Then one day she had an epiphany: she realized she was spending her life making large, anonymous, companies larger and more anonymous. This tough realization led to burnout, anxiety and depression. After years of exploration, Dr. Regedanz shifted her experience when she realized her life could be directed around her priorities and values rather than chasing other people’s ideas of success.

Dr. Regedanz began coaching people struggling with job stress in 2002. She decided to become a psychologist when she realized the real power in helping her favorite clients was in working on many levels: emotional as well as cognitive. She has been serving clients in therapy for 19 years. She opened her private practice as a licensed psychologist in Palo Alto in 2009. Today she is the kind of therapist she was looking for.

Dr. Regedanz has a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology where she learned a holistic, positive, strength-based, mindful way of facilitating psychotherapy. Her academic research focuses on how people successfully recover from job burnout. Dr. Regedanz is an EMDRIA Certified EMDR Therapist and a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) Certified Practitioner. She has had extensive training in IFS (Level 1 And 2) and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (Levels 1 and 2).

Dr. Regedanz’s clinical work is heavily informed by Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR), Internal Family Systems (IFS), Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Existential-Humanistic Psychology, Mindfulness, Brene Brown’s work focused on healing from shame and perfectionism, Interpersonal Neurobiology, Positive Psychology, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).

When she’s away from the office, Dr. Regedanz enjoys family and friends, yoga (hot/Bikram, Iyengar, Vinyasa, Ashtanga), Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (blue belt), open water swimming (Surfer’s Beach, El Granada; Aquatic Park in San Francisco; Alcatraz to Fort Mason), meditation, music, watching standup comedy and cooking.

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