What I love most about my job is getting the opportunity to sit with you in some of life's tougher spots.  I believe that it is being met in those places that allows us to heal and grow.  I get the chance to do this professionally both in my private practice office in Wallingford as well as at the Student Counseling Center at Seattle Pacific University.  I specialize in working with people struggling with food and body issues and eating disorders. I also work with those struggling with anxiety, depression, life transitions, divorce, and relational issues.  My passion for food and body issues comes from the idea that sometimes our bodies have a way of expressing our struggles that we have not found words for yet.

That is a bit about why I do this work. 

Here is the technical stuff that allows me to do it...

I am a Washington State Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LH60283952).  I hold a Bachelor of Social Work degree from Miami University, and a Masters of Arts in Counseling Psychology from Mars Hill Graduate School (now The Seattle School for Theology and Psychology).

 

Although I appreciate a variety of therapeutic orientations, I most closely align myself with a psychodynamic relational therapeutic approach.  It is my belief that our core desire is for relationship and it is within the context of relationship that we can heal.  Relationships deeply form us and often, the roots of our unrest are discovered in how we relate to ourselves and others.  Within the therapeutic relationship I will seek to develop a relationship that unfolds the ways you relate to yourself and other  The hope is for both parties in the therapeutic relationship to be open, real and vulnerable to the effects that humans have on us, including the human that is sitting across from us.  Relational psychotherapy offers presence rather than analysis, empathy rather than sympathy, and the face of another human being, rather than the face of a detached professional.