Prior to pursuing a career in psychotherapy and social work I held a range of program delivery & operational roles at a youth serving nonprofit. I came into this work with a passionate desire to support young people in building self knowledge, confidence, and expression. The nonprofit I worked for did all of this while also teaching the vital elements of setting goals, planning, and executing. Through the influence of this organization I gained an ethos of optimistic realism: a mindset that enables big dreaming supported by the safe constraints of actionable practicality.

Around the time I began working at the youth serving nonprofit I started volunteering for a program that supports incarcerated people to prepare for their parole board interviews. This work was intense, exhausting, and often felt incredibly bleak and hopeless. I considered abandoning my role several times, but the more I got to know the people we served, the more I understood of individuals’ complexity, and the effect of the environments and systems we’re all enmeshed in. I became committed to two ideas: a person is much more than the worst thing they’ve done or experienced, and all people deserve to have a chance to grow and redeem themselves.

Despite gaining some grounding values, I continued to struggle with feeling dejected and hopeless in the work, making me not the greatest to work with! A conversation with the organization’s director helped me reorient: I needed to understand that success takes many forms. Sure, the stated goal may be for an applicant to achieve parole, but there are many other hugely important successes to identify, value, and celebrate: supporting an applicant in reconnecting with family, an applicant identifying personal strengths and speaking of them proudly, an applicant completing a stress management course… progress and achievement could take many forms. Identifying and celebrating a diversity of wins not only made the tougher ones more achievable, but also made the experience more positive and fulfilling for everyone.

These experiences allowed me to see and nurture my tendencies towards empathy, capitalizing on strengths, collaborative exploration, and goal setting and execution. I came to understand that I wanted to be in direct service to people, jumping into the weeds together to dig around, unearth, and plant anew.

I take a client-centered and humanistic approach to the therapeutic relationship, meaning that I believe you know yourself best and have the potential to chart your path and execute your goals. I’m here to help you explore your experiences, needs, and potential paths forward, and offer supports along the way. These supports may look like identifying behavior patterns, engaging mindfulness practices, rewriting your self-narrative, establishing achievable goals, or exploring past experiences through a new lens, among many other things. We’ll collaborate to determine what routes and practices are best for you.

Our first few sessions together will be explorative and fairly unstructured. As we move forward, we may identify goals that you want to focus on or topics you want to explore. We’ll tailor the amount of structure from there.

I often encourage clients to compassionately reconsider what “progress” means to them, especially when thinking of the therapeutic setting. Mainstream society can be overwhelmingly materialistic and accolade-driven. Psychotherapy can offer space and perspective to reevaluate what progress, and overall well being, may mean to you.

I ground myself in cultural humility; we may have different backgrounds, but I will always regard your experiences and beliefs with respect and dignity.

Learning is a key part of my work as a therapist. In addition to participating in clinical supervision and peer consultation, I regularly attend trainings and workshops to further my practice. I choose topics to study based on client needs, societal trends, and personal interests. I’ve completed a myriad of workshops and trainings focused on CBT, trauma-focused CBT, mindfulness, systems theory, neurodiversity, and infusing creative expression into the therapeutic experience, among other topics. I plan to soon gain more expertise in somatic therapy, Gestalt Therapy, and Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS).