Clinical Expertise
Welcome! I am a licensed mental health counselor with 15 years' experience helping people get to the roots of their difficulties. I specialize in:
• trauma processing
• relationship difficulties • feelings of disconnection or dissatisfaction • physical, psychological, and sexual abuse • depression and anxiety • spiritual issues and questions about existence • loss and sadness Therapy is the establishment of a trusting relationship. It offers a place of honest and genuine care where you can speak of the matters that most deeply impact you and the events where you felt pain, anger, fear, or shame. In response to harm, we often choose ways of coping that hurt others and ourselves. The goal of therapy is to encourage change and growth for the sake of living with more freedom and loving others better. Many difficulties in current relationships are rooted in patterns established in childhood. In counseling, we look at the ways you learned to relate as a child and how they interfere with experiencing freedom and intimacy today. As we work together, we look at integrity (facing truth that we have avoided), freedom (shedding the unnecessary constraints we put on ourselves), and responsibility (seeing ourselves as people who can choose and have an impact for good in our world). You will reap the most benefit from therapy if you are willing to wrestle with pain and grief, embrace joy and play, do outside reading (see my list of resources), and take risks in relationships to learn to live more fully. Ultimately, counseling is successful to the extent that you recognize the only person you can change is yourself. My hope is that the work we do together enables you to live with more freedom, enjoy deeper relationships, embrace pain in a way that increases your capacity for true joy, and leave a beautiful mark on your world.
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver