What you can expect from our work

The arc of transformation

My work, in a nutshell, focuses on the full arc of transformation. Together, we uncover the protective adaptations shaping your life, process unresolved emotional experiences, and undo aloneness within a deeply attuned therapeutic relationship. From there, I help you access your innate capacity for wholeness, vitality, and joy. As change unfolds, I support you in thoughtfully integrating and embodying new ways of relating, living, and experiencing yourself so that transformation becomes not only understood but deeply felt, sustainable, and fully lived.

Therapy, in its highest service, is not simply about reducing symptoms. While relief matters, the deepest and most enduring change involves something far more profound: helping people reorganize the way they experience themselves, others, and life itself.

My work is grounded in the belief that human beings possess an innate drive toward connection, healing, growth, and wholeness. Even beneath long-standing pain, protective patterns, emotional disconnection, or trauma, there remains a deeply human orientation toward vitality, authenticity, and meaningful relationships. Therapy, at its best, creates the conditions for the human spirit to thrive.

I specialize in helping individuals move beyond survival-based ways of living and relating. I work with people-pleasing, perfectionism, overfunctioning, emotional disconnection, anxiety, self-criticism, attachment styles, or difficulty trusting self or others. These strategies aren’t pathology to eliminate, but adaptive strategies that emerged in response to unmet attachment needs, trauma, emotional overwhelm, or relational environments that could not fully support authentic emotional experience. Over time, however, this hidden architecture can begin to feel constricting, exhausting, or no longer aligned with your Self.

My approach is deeply relational, experiential, and emotionally engaged. I work actively and collaboratively to help clients understand the deeper organization beneath their struggles, process unresolved emotional experiences, and develop new ways of relating to themselves, their emotions, and the people they love.

But healing is rarely the end of the process.

Often, after people begin releasing old pain, limiting beliefs, or long-standing survival strategies, they arrive at an unfamiliar threshold: the old way of being no longer fits, yet the new way of living has not fully taken shape. This stage can feel both liberating and disorienting. Clients may experience greater openness, emotional clarity, self-trust, authenticity, or connection while simultaneously realizing they are learning how to inhabit life differently for the first time.

This is an area of work I care deeply about and have spent over twenty years refining.

I help clients actively, thoughtfully, and purposefully scaffold new ways of being and relating – ways that are more secure, integrated, embodied, emotionally connected, and aligned. Together, we work toward helping those changes become sustainable and lived in everyday life. Therapy becomes a space to practice new experiences of connection, boundaries, vulnerability, self-expression, emotional regulation, and authenticity until they gradually begin to feel more natural and fully one’s own.

Across two decades of clinical work, I have come to believe that transformation is not about becoming someone else. It is about removing the barriers that have prevented someone from fully inhabiting themselves.

My role is to help create the conditions where that process can unfold with depth, safety, clarity, and care.

My Treatment Approach

What underpins my work

I believe the most meaningful thing I bring to this work is my wholehearted, ongoing commitment to three things: deep presence, lifelong learning, and personal integration. For over two decades, I’ve devoted myself to the art and practice of therapy, not just through advanced training, supervision, and consultation, but by listening closely to what truly helps my clients, and also what helped me in my own healing.

My decision to become a therapist wasn’t just about serving others; it was also about making sense of my own life. From the beginning, I knew this calling was personal. I’ve spent years doing the difficult, tender work of facing my own story, especially my early experiences, so I could show up as someone grounded, whole, and free. I believe deeply that doing my own healing is a sacred part of being able to support others in theirs.

At the center of my work is the therapeutic relationship itself. Lasting change rarely occurs through insight alone. Transformation happens when painful emotional experiences no longer have to be carried in isolation. Within a safe and attuned relationship, clients are able to access emotions, needs, longings, grief, fear, anger, tenderness, and parts of themselves that may once have felt overwhelming, unsafe, or out of reach. As these experiences are processed and integrated – not simply discussed intellectually – clients often begin to feel more grounded, coherent, emotionally alive, connected, and fully themselves.

My clinical foundation rests on well-established, evidence-based models rooted in attachment, emotion, trauma, family systems, somatic psychotherapy, and intergenerational patterns. I draw particularly from Emotionally Focused Individual and Couples Therapy (EFIT and EFCT), Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), Internal Family Systems (IFS), Structural Family Therapy, and Bowenian Family Systems. These approaches provide not only research-backed foundations but deeply sophisticated maps for understanding how lasting change can occur. I utilize these models to offer a highly integrated model that organizes human suffering, the process of transformation, and the power of the therapeutic relationship itself.

Most recently, AEDP has become a central organizing framework in my work. AEDP understands healing as the activation of an innate biological drive toward growth, integration, and flourishing. Rather than focusing solely on pain, this approach recognizes that people are wired for healing when the right relational and emotional conditions are created. I have found this lens to be profoundly hopeful, deeply human, and remarkably effective in helping clients create the change they seek.

Originally from England, I moved to the U.S. over 16 years ago to build a life with my (now retired) military husband. We have three precious children who challenge and inspire me every day to live with more honesty, presence, and vulnerability. They are a daily reminder of why I do this work – and why breaking cycles, showing up with love, and healing from the inside out matter so deeply.

Working With Therapists

Therapy and Self-of-the-Therapist Work

Alongside my work with clients, I’ve also poured my energy into supporting other therapists. I’ve always been drawn to the process of what it means to become a therapist and how much growth, vulnerability, and inner work it requires. Over the past ten years, I’ve developed a framework called The Parallel Process™ (trademark pending), designed to help therapists thrive. It’s a model that provides the structure, clarity, and support we all need to grow into the most authentic and effective versions of ourselves, all in service to our clients, our craft, our growth, and our calling.

It includes the important process of Person-of-the-Therapist or Self-of-the-Therapist work. As therapy is fundamentally a human-to-human encounter, we must also engage in our own process of exploring, organizing, and processing our lived experiences. We must be mindful of mitigating the impact our own ‘stuff’ can have on the therapeutic process and the client’s experience. 

This model shapes everything I do at The Center for Connection, Healing and Change. It shows up in how I work with clients, our team, and how I support therapists and leaders outside of the practice to reach their professional and personal potential.

If you’re a therapist or leader longing for your next phase of growth, looking to deepen your clinical work, or want to reflect on how your work activates your own attachment patterns – I’m here for you. Whether you’re burned out, at a crossroads, or just feeling that quiet pull toward something more meaningful, we can explore what healing and expansion look like for you.

I’m a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Virginia, Washington D.C, Maryland, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York. I earned my BSc in Psychology from the University of Leeds in England and a master’s degree in Marriage and Family Therapy from the University of Southern Mississippi – a training experience that truly changed my life. I’ll always be grateful to the mentors who saw me, pushed me, and helped shape the therapist I’ve become.

To schedule a free phone consultation with me and see if we might be a good fit, please call (703) 878-3290 or click here