Services Offered
I offer counseling for adolescents and adults, couples, families. I also offer a variety of group work: specific support groups, experiential psycho-education and study groups, as well as presentations, workshops, and a variety of caregiver education and trainings.
Reasons Why People Come in For Counseling:
- Prolonged worrying, reactivity, and despair
- Challenging/complex relationships
- Trauma and PTSD
- Having a strong inner-inner critics that prevents a deep sense of self-worth
- A sudden, disruptive life change
- Not being able to feel grounded and emotionally stable
- Persistent relationship challenges with partner/spouse, family, friends and co-workers
- Feelings of aloneness that prevent healthy connection with others
- Painful endings: bereavement, divorce, kids moving out, retirement, aging, and illness.
- Feeling stuck in a pattern of self-defeating or self-harming behaviors
- The distress of caring for a loved one who is aging, disabled, or seriously ill (chronic or terminal illness)
About Duration and Type(s) of Therapy
My goal is to help in an effective and appropriate way. How we work together and how long we work together both depend on why a client is seeking therapy. Some are seeking support for a particular situation, and our work can be focused and concise, whereas others may have felt burdened for years and seek an ongoing, long-term process. Our work together will build insight, establish resources, and develop effective, skillful, take-away practices.
Area of Expertise and Particular Interest
- Challenging/complex relationships
- Trauma and PTSD
- Aging, illness, and end-of-life
- Grief, loss, & bereavement
- Adolescents (10-22)
- Millennials and Young Adults (21-34)
- Anxiety, introversion, highly sensitive people
- Life transitions
- Parenting, partnered and post-partner co-parenting
- Separated and blended family dynamics
- Resilience and self-care for family caregivers
- Professional caregivers: medical, education, social justice, corrections, ministry, law enforcement, first responders
- Mindfulness and meditation teacher
Please see “Services” for more detailed information on individual counseling, couples counseling, family counseling, and groups and workshops.
How We Work Together?
Relationships are living organisms that are always emerging and unique to those engaged. Though I am trained in a variety of related therapeutic approaches that resonate with me at a deep level, how I work depends on who I’m working with, what arises between us, and what best serves a client’s interests and needs.
I take an integrated experiential and relational approach to psychotherapy, tuning in to a client’s unique life experience with compassionate regard and deep curiosity, nurturing a therapeutic relationship based on genuine warm, high regard, transparency, and trust that allows us to explore together – to gain insight, and facilitate healing and growth.
Some Benefits Might Include:
- More effective and beneficial ways of managing your distress, anxiety, panic, depression, anger, and loss.
- Development of healthier relationship skills to more deeply connect with those in your life.
- Letting go of self-defeating patterns, and establishing healthier and more beneficial approaches to life’s challenges.
- Thoughtfully identifying what you most want from life, and defining and reaching personal goals through greater personal clarity.
- Developing the practice of vulnerability to explore what hurts and building the courage to “live the life you’ve imagined.”
- To “find a place of rest in the middle of things.”
What is Contemporary Psychotherapy?
As models of psychotherapy have evolved and become more nuanced over the last decade or so, many of us now identify ourselves as “integrative practitioners.” This means that our approach is informed by a variety of related orientations and approaches – ways of thinking, models, trainings, and skills – that have empirically been shown to work well together and build a strong base of supportive therapeutic care.
This has shifted psychotherapy away from its original medicalized and analytical model (psychiatry) and research-focused diagnostic model (psychology) into a client-centered model of therapeutic person-to-person care (therapy: some call it counseling and others call it psychotherapy). This emergence has become increasingly supportive for clients and leads to more effective and beneficial outcomes. Because therapy has a better reputation, we’re also seeing a decrease of the stigma that has long been associated with seeking professional help.
Because we are extensively “cross-trained,” you will sometimes see lists of numerous training names and acronyms, indicating “certifications,” and training “levels.” This is how we communicate the multiple dimensions and approaches in which we are trained to bring to our work. We value a variety of perspectives and skills so that we can best serve each client’s need in a mindful and skillful way.