My approach

We are continually taking in and interpreting information through our emotions, bodies, relationships, and lived experiences. When something feels threatening, painful, or overwhelming, the mind and nervous system naturally respond by trying to protect us. You may withdraw, pursue reassurance, become highly responsible or controlling, disconnect from your emotions, criticize yourself, or become intensely focused on another person’s reactions.

These responses are rarely random, and they are not signs that something is wrong with you. They are often intelligent adaptations that developed to help you maintain safety, belonging, or connection. A response that once protected you from rejection, conflict, unpredictability, or emotional pain may continue long after the original danger has passed. Over time, these protective strategies can become the same patterns that leave you feeling stuck, disconnected, or unable to respond in the ways you would choose.

Our work will begin with understanding what has brought you to therapy, what you hope will become different, and how you want to experience yourself and your relationships. We will pay attention to the patterns that emerge when you feel hurt, rejected, misunderstood, threatened, or emotionally alone. We will also explore how your earlier experiences of care, closeness, conflict, and emotional safety may continue to shape the ways you seek connection and protect yourself today.

In emotionally charged moments, you may notice different sides of yourself pulling in opposite directions. One part of you may long for reassurance while another is afraid of needing anyone. One may work hard to remain capable, responsible, and in control, while another feels frightened, angry, ashamed, overwhelmed, or unseen. You may want closeness and simultaneously feel the urge to withdraw from it. Slowing these moments down can help you understand what each response is trying to accomplish and allow you to meet yourself with compassion rather than criticism.

We make space for noticing changes in your body, remaining with an emotion as it begins to emerge, exploring an image or memory, or helping you express something that has been difficult to put into words. We may slow down a familiar interaction and notice the precise moment you begin to shut down, become anxious, lose contact with your needs, or feel responsible for another person’s emotions. This allows new understanding to become something you can experience and practise, rather than something you only understand intellectually.

We will listen for the deeper emotions and needs beneath the reactions that are most visible. Anger may be protecting hurt, fear, or a longing to matter. Withdrawal may be an attempt to protect against rejection, conflict, or overwhelm. The need to control may arise when uncertainty feels unsafe. Self-criticism may be trying to prevent failure, disapproval, or abandonment. When these responses are understood in context, it becomes possible to relate to them differently and develop new ways of caring for the needs beneath them.

The pacing of this work matters. Healing does not come from pushing beyond your limits or disclosing more than you are ready to explore. We will approach difficult experiences carefully, respecting your boundaries and paying attention to your emotional and physical capacity. You will have choice in what we explore, how deeply we move into it, and when we need to pause, slow down, or return to a greater sense of steadiness.

As you develop a clearer and more compassionate relationship with your inner experience, we will also explore what matters most to you and how you want to live. The goal is to strengthen your own internal compass so that your choices increasingly reflect your emotional needs, personal values, relationships, and the person you are becoming.

Over time, you may find that you can recognize your protective reactions earlier, remain more connected to yourself during difficult moments, and respond with greater intention. The goal is not to remove every painful feeling or prevent you from ever becoming activated. It is to help you feel less governed by old patterns and more able to move through your life and relationships with security, compassion, and choice.

Individual Therapy

Individual therapy offers a space to turn toward the parts of yourself that may have been ignored, criticized, hidden, or shaped around the needs of others.

You may have learned to maintain connection by being helpful, agreeable, independent, high-achieving, or emotionally responsible for everyone around you. You may understand other people easily while feeling uncertain about your own needs. Perhaps you can recognize your patterns but struggle to change them when you feel activated, rejected, ashamed, or afraid.

Our work will gently explore the layers beneath these experiences. We will look at how your history has influenced your emotional responses, relationships, beliefs about yourself, and ways of finding safety. We may also explore less familiar or hidden aspects of the self—the emotions, needs, strengths, and desires that have not always felt safe to acknowledge.

Over time, you may find that you can remain connected to yourself during difficult interactions, identify what belongs to you, set clearer boundaries, and express your needs without becoming consumed by guilt, anxiety, or old pain. You may become less dependent on external approval and more able to trust your own emotional guidance.

The aim is not to become a different person. It is to become more fully yourself—integrated, grounded, and able to move through the world with greater emotional freedom.

Meaningful change often begins when you no longer have to fight against your own experience. As you learn to understand the language of your emotions, body, and protective responses, you can begin to meet yourself with greater compassion and respond to others with more clarity.

Therapy may help you move from reacting automatically to becoming more aware of what is happening within you in the moments when you feel hurt, threatened, or overwhelmed. Rather than blaming, withdrawing, or becoming disconnected, you can begin to recognize and express the deeper emotions and needs beneath your reactions.

You may become less focused on managing everyone else’s emotions and more able to remain grounded in your own experience. Instead of losing yourself to preserve connection, you can learn to stay connected to others without abandoning your own needs, boundaries, or sense of self.

Over time, inherited patterns can give way to more intentional, values-based choices. The wounds you have understood intellectually can begin to heal through new emotional and relational experiences, allowing you to move from protecting yourself through disconnection toward creating relationships that feel safer, more secure, and more deeply connected.

Transformation is not the absence of pain. It is the growing ability to remain connected to yourself while moving through pain—and to allow your relationships to become places where honesty, vulnerability, and repair are possible.

Couples Therapy

You may love one another deeply and still find yourselves caught in a cycle that neither of you knows how to stop. One partner may push for conversation, closeness, or reassurance while the other becomes defensive, shuts down, problem-solves, or tries to keep the peace. The more one reaches, the more the other retreats. Over time, both partners can feel rejected, unappreciated, or emotionally alone.

These cycles often become especially painful because they touch essential human needs: the need to be seen, heard, valued, loved, and emotionally safe with the person who matters most. When those needs are difficult to express directly, they may appear through criticism, anger, protest, silence, accommodation, or withdrawal.

In couples therapy, we will work to understand the cycle rather than deciding which partner is the problem. We will slow down the moments when connection is lost and identify the fears, longings, and protective reactions that shape each person’s response.

You will learn to communicate through needs-based language that reduces blame and makes it safer for your partner to remain emotionally present. Our work may include structured dialogue, experiential exercises, exploration of protective responses, and guided conversations designed to help each of you speak from a more honest and vulnerable place.

For some couples, this work involves rebuilding after betrayal or broken trust. For others, it may focus on parenting, grief, pregnancy, postpartum changes, trauma recovery, or the cumulative disconnection created by the demands of everyday life.

Whatever brings you to therapy, the goal is not simply to reduce conflict. It is to create a relationship in which both partners can feel more fully known, supported, and free to be themselves. As each partner develops a more compassionate relationship with their own emotions and protective responses, the relationship can become a place of shared healing rather than repeated injury.

My Background

My academic background includes a master’s degree in mental health counseling from Capella University. Since completing my graduate education, I have pursued ongoing training in several therapeutic approaches that support depth-oriented, relational, and experiential work, including attachment, family systems, Gestalt, Emotionally Focused Individual and Couple Therapy, Internal Family Systems and parts work, and reality therapy.

My understanding of healing began through lived and experiential learning long before I became a counselor. My own process of growth awakened a desire to understand healing more deeply and eventually to accompany others in their own work.

I began this path more than 27 years ago, and it has continued to evolve through personal reflection, academic study, clinical training, and years of working directly with clients.

My early clinical experience included working as a mental health case manager while completing my master’s degree in mental health counseling at Capella University. This work grounded me in the realities of the human experience and reinforced how deeply we all need safety, dignity, belonging, and meaningful connection.

I later worked with at-risk youth in a residential treatment setting. In that environment, progress was not always immediate or easily measured. I learned that the therapeutic relationship itself can be profoundly meaningful. Patience, consistency, acceptance, and the willingness to remain present often create the foundation from which change eventually becomes possible.

I carried these lessons into private practice, where I have worked with individuals and couples across a range of relational, emotional, and life concerns. Throughout these experiences, one principle has remained central: therapy is most powerful when clients feel genuinely met by another human being while also being supported in moving toward the changes they want to create.