Eventually, everyone may go through a depression or have depressive symptoms due to a loss or a major life transition. Some experience more serious episodes that may be recurring, more or less intensely, over years. Other people may be vulnerable to weaving in and out of feelings of depression due to their tendency to see things through a negative lens, experience high levels of anger or frustration and they may have trouble developing close social supports.

If you are experiencing any type of depression, it’s important to take it seriously.

When treating depression, there is no one simple magic trick. I provide support, encouragement, education, and evidence-based interventions.

You can learn more about what you’re dealing with. I will share what research tells us about things that make depression worse and things that make it better.

You can increase your self-awareness and broaden your perspective for better mental health now and in the long run.

We will work together to implement changes, improve your life skills and your ability to cope.

I want to help you climb out of your depression and to help you become more resilient now and for your future.

Schedule free consultation to discuss how I can meet your needs.

I help people who are living with anxiety and low self-esteem learn coping strategies and skills to build their resilience and sense of confidence. I use evidence-based interventions to foster self-awareness, empowerment, and self-determination.

Anxiety, whether it is generalized, or prompted by social situations, by having to perform, or by stress, is a horrible experience.  Anxiety creates sweaty palms, a pounding heart, muscle tension and restlessness. Many people feel dread, irritable, indecisive, uncertain, and fearful. 

Anxiety can turn our thoughts negative. It commonly creates low self-confidence, self-incrimination, and a certainty that others don’t like you.  For some people, anxiety can grow into panic and can become a full attack.

When some people have anxiety, they feel frozen and their mind goes blank.  Other people feel like crying and their thoughts are racing. Almost everyone with anxiety tries to use escape and avoidance as the favorite tools in their toolbox. 

I know that gaining control over your anxiety is not easy. I’m here to support you. I’m here to both lead you out and to partner with you. In counseling, you can come to recognize your triggers and learn skills to start coping with them preemptively.

We will choose the Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), Dialectic Behavior Therapy (DBT) and Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) interventions for treating anxiety that resonate with you. 

Schedule free consultation to discuss how I can meet your needs.

I help people overcome new and old pain, using evidence-based interventions grounded in compassion and acceptance.

You don’t have to live with the fall-out from trauma. At this point, there is a full body of research that shows us what helps people heal from this.

I take the “active ingredients” approach. As a Certified Clinical Trauma Professional (CCTP), I combine many techniques that we know work to form a comprehensive treatment plan. For example, we know that people do best when they can establish a strong therapeutic alliance, they get psycho-education and interventions that have components of reprocessing thoughts and emotions around traumatic memories. Also, people benefit from cognitive restructuring and meaning making. I use all of these active ingredients for the resolution of trauma in a comprehensive treatment plan that includes EMDR.

You may have heard of EMDR. After 37 years of research, it is established as one of the most effective interventions for trauma. EMDR is endorsed by The World Health Organization, The American Psychiatric Association, The American Psychological Association, US Department of Veterans Affairs & Department of Defense, The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence and The International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies for its effectiveness.

I hope you will schedule a free consultation to discuss how I can meet your needs.

I have blog posts on this website about starting your healing journey for trauma related to sexual violence. If you would like to read more, access How Do You Find Healing and Resolution After Sexual Violence? Five Things You Need To Know on my blog.

Read Coping & Self Care Strategies for Survivors of Sexual Violence on my blog.

For people who live with bipolar disorder, the goal in counseling is to have good, stable mental health. When mood swings happen, we want them to be as short and mild as possible. Also, we want many symptom-free years between episodes. 

When you come to counseling, this is a stigma-free zone.  I want to support you and teach you what the research shows helps most for people who are managing bipolar disorder.

You can learn to be proactive, not reactive and you can learn coping skills for the triggers that affect your mood.

I help with ongoing support and by helping you implement lifestyle strategies that can keep your mood stable over time.

You can gain confidence and be empowered to break the barrier of negative and unfair beliefs about bipolar disorder. It does not have to be a poorly understood condition, shrouded in myths, that you worry about discussing. I help with communication skills. You can tell the people you want to connect with about how you get healthy and stay healthy. 

I implement evidence based interventions from CBT, DBT and ACT.

Schedule a consultation to talk about how I can meet your needs.

I help people who are living with chronic pain learn coping strategies and skills to build their resilience and sense of confidence. I use evidence-based interventions to foster self-awareness, empowerment, and self-determination.

Chronic pain touches so many things in your life. It can create less ability to be a part of activities and gatherings. This can lead to having fewer social ties and more isolation.

Chronic pain is invisible, so many people may come to feel misunderstood, or stigmatized. Over time the effects of chronic pain can lead to more disability and less and less enjoyment in your life and relationships. For all these reasons, people who live with chronic pain are at higher risk for experiencing anxiety and depression.

There are a variety of things you can do to minimize your pain and improve your quality of life. Research shows that people do best when they combine multiple passive and active techniques. Some of these things you can incorporate yourself. For some of them, you can be helped by a physical therapist or a massage therapist. Some of them are interventions that come from counseling.

These are the things I can help you with:

• Support, active listening, reassurance, and encouragement

• I offer education because research shows that people are helped by better understanding the nature of chronic pain.

• Studies show that people’s experience of pain is influenced by their outlook, values, cultural beliefs, expectations, attitudes towards pain, and how they cope emotionally with pain. I use Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), to help manage chronic pain by helping you to identify the thoughts, feelings and behaviors that are working against you. I help you make changes that will increase your relief.

• I use CBT and Dialectic Behavior Therapy (DBT) for the treatment of anxiety and depression.

• I use Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) to help you evaluate your ideas and expectations. ACT teaches us how to focus our energy on finding new ways to live a fuller and more satisfying life, despite the pain.

• I teach coping skills.

• I teach relaxation techniques.

• I incorporate meditation and mindfulness.

• Making lifestyle changes can be difficult. We can work on adding the small and large changes that can improve your pain. Over time, these additions can become new habits for long term relief.

Schedule a free consultation so we can discuss your needs.

Each of us is supposed to experience a wide range of emotions. We are supposed to fully feel all the positive emotions like wonder, joy, and pleasure. Equally, we should be able to feel the entire range of difficult emotions like shame, guilt, and regret. This is the full human experience.

Sometimes people have trouble feeling, expressing and/or coping with the more difficult emotions. We can fall into a pattern of expressing anger as a replacement for hard emotions like shame or sadness, that make us feel vulnerable.

Anger is one of the natural emotions too. It’s normal to feel angry when we think we have been treated unfairly. Our anger becomes a problem when it is premature, rigid, disproportionate and it does not run its course. Keeping score and holding grudges is not healthy.

I help with education and skills to move someone from being an angry person to a person who is in control and someone who others can more easily connect with.

I offer the following interventions:

• Anger can kick in so fast; it feels automatic. However, we can learn to catch warning signs and triggers for your anger early. This creates an opening for you to use anger management techniques, coping skills and communication skills instead of aggressive words and behaviors.

• Anger happens in the part of the brain that is genetically programmed to manage threat. We can move from using that part of the brain to using the part of our brain that houses our self-control, flexible thinking, problem-solving, planning, and our ability to consider the future.

• Learn how to control anger with emotional self-regulation. Self-regulation is a series of skills that begins with education, self-awareness, and mindfulness.

• You can learn to interrupt your patterns, gain impulse control, and stop the domino-effect from your anger with de-escalation.

Learning to control your anger is not quick and easy. However, I help with education, the Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) interventions I described above and skills training. I help by explaining and demonstrating. Then I practice with you before you go into your real life situations and relationships.

Lastly, I also incorporate interventions from Dialectic Behavior Therapy (DBT) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).

I hope you will schedule a free consultation to discuss your needs.

If you want to learn more about How to Know If You, or Someone You Love, Needs Anger Management, you can read my blog post here.

If you would like to read more, you can find Common Myths About Anger Management, on my blog.

I am an ADHD Certified Clinical Service Provider (ADHD-CCSP). I help people who are living with ADHD gain insight and learn skills that increase their ability to be successful in school, at work and in their relationships.

ADHD looks different in children, teens and adults. There are differences in how it presents across genders. Also, ADHD symptoms can vary tremendously from person to person. For all these reasons, it can be difficult to get a clear understanding about what ADHD is and how it affects you and the people in your life. More importantly, you may want a better understanding of what to do about it. What are your options?

Whether you are here to work with your own, adult ADHD, or here as a parent to help your child with ADHD, I can help answer your questions, identify your goals and teach you how to manage your symptoms.

We can address things like:

• What causes ADHD?

• What does ADHD look like in the brain?

• How is ADHD diagnosed?

• What if I have trauma in my history? How can I tease apart the trauma from ADHD?

• What is the role of medication?

• What are my options if I don’t want to take medication or put my child on medication?

• How does ADHD affect my child developmentally, across their childhood?

The skills training and CBT interventions can address the following:

• Learn how you or your child/teen can manage their symptoms to have less forgetting, avoiding, procrastination, inability to manage time, and more ability to listen and follow through.

• Learn what to do about emotional outbursts.

• Learn how to handle lying.

• Learn how to minimize restlessness or impulsivity.

• Learn how you can keep ADHD from having a negative impact on your relationships.

• Learn how to overcome procrastination.

I offer psycho-education and skills training and I use interventions from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectic Behavior Therapy (DBT), and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).

Schedule a free, 15 minute consultation to discuss how I can meet your needs.

Parenting can be difficult. We all want to nurture a close and healthy relationship with our children. Often we are dismayed when we catch ourselves slipping into strategies that may get the chores or homework done but ultimately could deteriorate the relationship.

Counseling for parents provides the support every parent can benefit from. Also, I help with education, guidance, and skills training to help parents understand their children’s needs and how best to meet those needs. For example, learn how to regulate your strong emotions as a way to help your child regulate theirs. Learn how to have more positive communication, how to set boundaries, and follow through. Lastly, learn how to manage difficult behaviors, reduce conflict, and increase cooperation and participation through connection.

I incorporate interventions from Cognitive Behavior Therapy, (CBT), Dialectic Behavior Therapy (DBT), Acceptance and Commitment therapy (ACT) and skills training.

Schedule a free consultation to see how I can meet your needs.

Parents who learn that their beloved son or daughter is transgender often feel like they have entered a whole new world. They may not know the language here or understand the customs. They may feel disoriented and uncertain about what it all means for their child’s future, themselves, and their family.

Your child can have a wonderful life and the future you always wanted for them. All they need is help, to be loved and to stay connected to their support network and their communities. Therefore, as a parent, you can be a pivotal person who can have a great impact on how things unfold from here.

When I work with family members of transgender youth, I take a very hands-on approach. You and I will roll up our sleeves together. Sometimes, it will feel like therapy. Sometimes it may feel like support. Sometimes it will be more like an interactive workshop. I combine education, discussion, and skills training to help you understand and navigate this new landscape.

We will address and discuss all your concerns and needs. You can gain more understanding about many different aspects of this new world. For example, the most common questions I get are:

• Are there more people who are transgender now than before? If so, why?

• Are there more kids who think they are transgender because it is a cool way to be different?

• What does LGBTGEQQIAAP+ stand for? Is it really that important to know this, or to use all those terms?

• Why is there so much focus on changing names and using different pronouns?

• Do kids change their minds about being transgender over time?

• What is “gender affirming care”? Is it safe?

• What does it mean to transition? What should I expect? Is it a good idea?

• What is dysphoria? How do I know if my child has dysphoria? If they do, what can we do about it?

• What are obstacles and challenges for transgender and nonbinary youth, long term?

Also, you can learn basic relationship skills that can improve your ability to connect with your child.

Skills like:

• How to have an open conversation with your child.

• What is the correct way to give feedback?

• What is a child supposed to do when microaggressions are committed against them?

• How can I teach my child to be resilient?

Also, learn basic communication skills like active listening, engagement and how to communicate unconditional positive regard in words and actions.

Schedule a free 15-minute consultation to discuss how I can meet your needs.

NOTE: I do not support conversion therapy. There is no evidence to demonstrate its efficacy and it has been shown to be harmful.