my story

I have been in private practice here in Portland Oregon for the past 15 years helping individuals, couples, parents and families find more joy and connection in their lives. Prior to that early career was working with individuals and families experiencing sexual abuse or trauma. For about 15 years I worked with offenders, victims and families with a focus on preventing further abuse. This foundation of work, steeped in trauma therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy and relapse prevention provided me with a deep understanding and intimacy with the family pain and cycles that so many of us come into therapy with. After having my own children, I transitioned my practice to one focusing on building healthy families through parenting, couples and individual adult work. I love to work with families going through a restructuring phase with a firm belief that we can build healthy co-parenting family systems for children when divorce is the right path for a couple to take. Now as I look at the third phase of my career I am excited to really focus on meeting clients where they are at with more groups, retreats, extended sessions. I love having the space and time to really help my clients unfold and find themselves with a focus of building more joy, love, light and connection in their lives. 

 

My style is eclectic and I work from the heart. I believe my job is to meet you where you are at and I draw from my many years of experience, pull from various therapy modalities, and find what is right for you. I love doing working with our attachment styles to understand our relationships, somatic work to understand our bodies and our nervous systems, mindfulness to increase our awareness of our patterns and systems, psychodynamic work to understand where we came from and how that shows up, meditation work to start to change the way our brain works, gratitude work, inciting joy, playfulness, laughter, connection. It’s all really about connection isn’t it? My personal style is direct and straightforward. I respect your journey and am so honored to get the privilege of doing this work with my clients. I love to incorporate humor into therapy with a firm belief that sometimes, we just need to laugh. 

 

I live in Portland with my two teenage sons and wonderful partner. We have worked for and built a close and caring co-parenting family system with their dad (so I know firsthand that it’s possible!) In addition to my work with clients, I love doing all the Portland things (camping, hiking, hanging with my dog, paddle boarding…) but more than anything I love to write. Poetry, blog posts, prose, novels shoved under my bed. I love it all. You can dip into blog posts on here talking about all things therapy. I hope this website can become a place for you to find meditations, writing, inspiration and hope. Sign up for a newsletter, clients can have a private page linking videos, prompts, blogs or tools specific to your therapy with me, or just browse around and see what calls to your heart. 

 

I’m so happy you are here. Let’s see what we can create together to tend to you!