I have been providing psychotherapy since 2007. I worked with adults, children, and families in a traditional outpatient community mental health clinic, and for most of my career, within an intensive services program where I traveled to families’ homes and children’s schools to provide services there. I also worked in a university counseling center setting before I opened my private practice in 2017.

When the Covid-19 pandemic pushed therapy online in March of 2020, I found that my ongoing clients who I’d seen in person felt that telehealth is just as effective and helpful as face to face therapy was for them. I do plan to stay 100% telehealth/online indefinitely, with no plans to return to in-office/face to face therapy. I find that telehealth helps me provide flexibility and accommodation for your needs related to neurodivergence and/or chronic illness, childcare availability, irregular or non-traditional schedules, and just avoiding the time spent sitting in traffic to get to an office for therapy.

My style of working with clients is to be open in discussing not just emotional and psychological factors, but also the social, gender, sexuality, cultural, racial, economic, spiritual, community, and power-/privilege-related factors that impact your life experience. I take the role of being a learner about who you are and where you're coming from, and try to find ways I can offer help that fits your individual needs and unique identity. I am affirming of marginalized identities and experiences, and critical of white supremacist, capitalist, ableist, cisheteropatriarchal normative culture both inside and outside of the therapy room. The ways that politics and social justice hold huge spaces in my life as a human being is inextricable from the ways they hold space in my mind as a therapist. The ways our daily lives are impacted by these forces is impossible to separate from our mental health.

My own lived experience/identity/context is as a white cis woman with a current level of class privilege that I address directly within my fee model. I was the first in my family to attend college, and grew up in a single parent household. I’m late-diagnosed AuDHD (which means autistic plus ADHD). I live with a chronic illness that is largely invisible, but has been part of my life for many years in varying degrees of disability. I have been in my own therapy off and on since my teen years, and have worked a lot on myself, my relationships, and my ever-evolving understanding of the world.

I believe therapy should be client-led; this means I see you as the expert on yourself and your needs, but also that I don’t generally have an agenda of what you will need to talk about each session. I do understand that many people prefer a more directive therapist who will “drive the car” of therapy sessions and give homework assignments weekly; my core ethics and ways of being in relationship/being in the world mean I am just not a good match for someone who is looking strictly for that style, and that’s ok. I will ask lots of questions and will be engaged with whatever you bring to discuss, and in general, I am going to defer to your own decisionmaking for things like setting your therapy goals, what you choose to talk about with me, and it is always going to be within your own power and choice whether to begin therapy, pause or take breaks in therapy, meet less/more frequently, or stop therapy altogether.

I practice with an anti-carceral mental health lens, which means I avoid engaging in the policing/punishing of your behavior within our therapeutic relationship, but more specifically, that I will do everything possible to avoid engaging any resources/processes on your behalf that involve the police in any escalated or crisis situations, or within the time we work together as a whole.

MY Mission

• Co-creating, with you, a supportive environment for your healing. The outdated traditional ideas of therapy that historically involved a therapist being an “expert” who you consult for answers about your problems are not what I aspire to follow. You’re the one in charge of your therapy, the one who decides what your goals are and what progress means to you. You are the expert.

• Transparency and honesty, so that you can know for yourself whether I am a person you can trust. I believe it is your right to have fully informed consent about who your therapist is, what they believe about the world, and how they interact with other people around them, in order for you to understand whether they are a right fit for you. I am open to any questions you have for me that relate to my personal views, politics, or my understanding/education/experience related to your lived experience in the world. Please know these questions are welcomed and invited.

• To build a safe relationship within the therapy context with you, with clear and caring communication between us, so that you can let me know if I get it wrong, or if I say something that feels hurtful or harmful. My intention is to be a person you can be honest with when you’ve been hurt, who you can count on to apologize and to try to repair the rupture with you.

• To help you to see yourself more clearly, to reflect your light to you, to build your felt sense of what it feels like to be more deeply seen and heard. I care deeply about this work and about every person I develop this unique and amazing kind of relationship with, and I hope for this true connection to allow you to hear more clearly what a more loving inner voice might begin to sound like. When we can begin to better know and understand the parts of us that have adapted to try to protect us, we create space for those things to begin to fall away when they may not really be needed (like in the relationships where we might really WANT to let love in, but struggle to know how). When our adapted defenses can fall away and pause, we can make abundant space for our own true, genuine inner voices to let us know what we want, what we hope for, what we are afraid of. My goal is to help you to find that safe enough place to connect to that authentic inner voice, your own individual compass and gut instinct, your realest self free from the weight of your hurt and your armor. Once you find that true voice and learn to hear it without the static… what could happen when you allow it to be your North Star on the way to the life you dream about for yourself?

CLINICAL AND EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE