Mindful Psychotherapy

07/08/2025

03/07/2024

I am thrilled that Houston Psychoanalytic Society will soon be presenting this film in collaboration with Center for Psychoanalytic Studies and Austin Psychoanalytic. The film will be capped by a vibrant discussion with two brilliant psychoanalysts.

“Your mum and dad” will be screened in person at 14 Pews and will also be available via zoom for those who can’t make it in person. Please join us!

https://myemail.constantcontact.com/REGISTER---Film-Screening---Your-Mum-and-Dad-on-3-21.html?soid=1134554263334&aid=xszPMa2rHzY&fbclid=IwAR0O8tO2hbm196Z1bdsgebYqZRRhEljaTfubTti2tBYTzf41Q4Iu2O2ga0k

March 21, 2024 Co-sponsored by Houston Psychoanalytic Society, Austin Psychoanalytic, and Center for Psychoanalytic Studies Private Film Screening Thursday, March 21, 2024 Registration closes March 1

11/28/2023

I'm thrilled to announce my first in-person trauma-informed yoga process group series since 2019. The group will be a 6 session series for women, beginning on January 9th and ending on February 14th.

Please reach out if you have questions or interest. Space is limited and selection for the group will be thoughtful.

http://www.elizabethhaberer.com/register-for-yoga/traumainformedyogaseries.

06/23/2023

Focusing on the sensations of the shapes vs. the external “achievement” of the pose.

Class tomorrow Trauma-Informed Yoga Class in Mueller Park 10-11 AM, hope to see folks in ATX there!

06/05/2023

I am thrilled to announce that I will be joining Depth Counseling as Clinic Director for Austin and Houston. Our mission is to make high-quality, long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy accessible, welcoming, and relatable to the people in our greater community, regardless of any client’s race, color, gender identity, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, or income level.

We are currently looking for therapists interested or experienced in long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy work in Texas. Please reach out to me if you are interested!

Elizabeth Haberer is a therapist in Austin, Texas for Trauma, Mood Disorders, and Relationships. She is Clinic Director of Depth Counseling in Houston/Austin.

05/19/2023

I am excited to begin offering THRIVE Trauma-Informed Yoga classes in Austin! Donation classes will begin in June at Mueller Park.

You are invited to a trauma-informed yoga donations class most Saturday mornings 10-11 AM at the Ampitheater at Lake Park in Mueller Park. Each class will feature a trauma-recovery theme and emphasize somatic agency to deepen embodiment and nervous system regulation. Spring/Summer Class dates: 6/1

04/03/2023

🍄I’m excited to share that I completed a certification in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies and Research, as well as specialized training in M**A therapy for PTSD.

💫I believe in this modality’s capacity to be a powerful tool to deepen therapeutic work. I have added a new offering to my clinical practice called Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) in partnership with Journey Clinical.

Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) is a psychedelic healing modality used as a complement to psychotherapy to help patients experience meaningful improvement in symptoms. It can be particularly helpful for depression and trauma.

01/17/2023

WHEN OUR MINDS COMMUNICATE PROBLEMS VIA OUR BODIES

One of the most peculiar ideas of psychology is that trauma may end up ‘in the body.’ We can understand that a difficult event might be lodged somewhere in the mind - but how, and by what mechanism, might a trauma get remembered or stuck in our physical selves? Can a kidney ‘remember’ a sorrow? Can a wrist or a femur hold on to the memory of a punitive parent or a painful divorce?
But mind and body are not impermeable entities; much traffic flows between them. When we are sad, some of the grief in our minds may well find a home in our shoulders; when we are terrified, some of the fear from our imaginations can grip onto our lower vertebrae.
The difficulty is that our organs lack eloquence. They are not by design particularly well-suited to explaining how terrible a relationship is or how difficult it once was around our mother. Our brains, which have the immense advantage of being directly tied to our mouths, have trouble enough letting on what is going on inside them; most of what we are remains deeply lodged in unconscious darkness. For their part, our bodily organs are even less well suited to writing our psychological biographies.
Nevertheless, if we can put it this way, the body has a conscience; it won’t let certain things go. If the pathway to self-expression has been blocked down the verbal route, then there may be no option but for certain messages to be redirected through our bodies. Bodily pain is hard to ignore - and that is the point. We suffer certain sorts of pain in our bodies when our minds become far too ingenious at overriding their own pulses of distress. We get into troubles because we are masters at looking past low-level depression or chronic anxiety. But when the deep self can’t take our emotional negligence any longer, we may develop the sort of backache that makes it incontrovertible that something is wrong. Our stomach may well have to ‘say’ what our minds are keeping quiet about. Our kidneys may have to give a voice - however ineloquent this may be - to troubles that have found no linguistic road out into the world.
Our bodies are liable to end up showing far fewer symptoms - of the sort doctors can’t get to the bottom of - the more we can consciously understand of our background traumas. The more we can speak, the less we will need to symptomise.
A body can’t ever really tell us more than that ‘something’ is wrong. The next bit, the sifting, the recollecting, the mourning and the interpreting, has to be done by the mind. But we can say thank you to our bodies for keeping us, as it were, with great pain, at points ‘honest’ about what we have gone through. They are mute historians, inarticulate historians, but historians nevertheless, and the more we can take the burden of memory off them, the less they may need to suffer - in an effort to help us to remember.

12/23/2022

If you feel lonely, let it move in your body, with your breath. Don’t act it out. It will turn into something else.

12/18/2022

Sometimes we think that to develop an open heart, to be truly loving and compassionate, means that we need to be passive, to allow others to abuse us, to smile and let anyone do what they want with us. Yet this is not what is meant by compassion. Quite the contrary. Compassion is not at all weak. It is the strength that arises out of seeing the true nature of suffering in the world. Compassion allows us to bear witness to that suffering, whether it is in ourselves or others, without fear; it allows us to name injustice without hesitation, and to act strongly, with all the skill at our disposal. To develop this mind state of compassion... is to learn to live, as the Buddha put it, with sympathy for all living beings, without exception.