(she/her)
Life is something, isn’t it? Moments of joy, accomplishment, and meaning can feel fleeting, and many of us find we spend much of our time wondering if we’re the only ones struggling to picture what contentment even looks like. Actually maintaining it in our daily lives can seem impossible. We look around at our families, our careers, our friendships, our relationships with our children, and we see areas where there is room for growth and change. The difference between noticing what we want to improve and having the strength, support, and courage to actually do it can feel vast. And lonely. Much of my work centers on the places where family relationships get quietly complicated: the invisible labor that accumulates until resentment starts doing the talking, the slow drift between parents and adult children that nobody planned for, and the people early in adulthood who are struggling to meet expectations, their own and everyone else's, and have no one they can actually be honest with about how hard it is. These aren't the kinds of struggles that get much airtime, which means the people carrying them often feel particularly alone with them. If any of that sounds familiar, you're probably in the right place. Sometimes just knowing you have someone to talk to who will listen, with warmth and kindness and without judgment, can make all the difference. Let's work together to build your capacity for growth. Let's build skills, confidence, and self-compassion. The reality of life is that moments of deep joy may be fleeting, but so are times of pain and the quiet "in-between" is where most of the meaning lies. We can work together to understand that meaning in your life and to learn to make the most of it.
I get genuinely excited to meet new clients, and I want you to feel that from the start. The first session is really just a conversation about what's going on, what's felt hard, and what you're hoping might be different. It is never lost on me what an honor it is to be the person you're choosing to share your story with, and I take that seriously. You'll leave having been heard, and with a sense of whether this feels like the right fit. One thing I want you to know before you even walk in: it's okay if you're not sure what you need. Most people aren't, at least not in any precise way. You might know something feels off, or that you're tired, or that a particular relationship keeps catching on the same place. That's enough to start. We don't need a clear agenda or a tidy list of goals on day one. We can figure out what this is together, and often that figuring-out is a significant part of the work itself. Your pace matters to me. I want to know all about you, genuinely, but you will only ever share what you are truly willing and able to. There is no pressure here, no expectation that you'll arrive ready to open up about the hardest thing right away. Some people do; most people don't, and both are completely fine. What I'm interested in is you, the real version, which means the version that needs a little time to settle in is just as welcome as any other. Something else worth saying: most of us are still figuring out who we are. That's not a problem to be solved before therapy can begin. For a lot of people, that's exactly why they're here. What we want, what we actually believe versus what we were taught to believe, the kind of person we're becoming versus the kind of person we always assumed we'd be, these are live questions for most of us well into adulthood, and they deserve real consideration in a space where nobody is keeping score. I'm not the kind of therapist who positions herself as the expert in the room. I tend to think that most of us already get plenty of unsolicited advice in our daily lives, and that's rarely what's actually missing. What I find more useful is getting genuinely curious, asking the kinds of questions that help you slow down, hear yourself, and start to separate what you actually think from the noise of expectations around you. You are the expert on your own life. My job is to ask good questions and pay close attention to the answers. I'm also intuitive, and I try to stay honest about what I'm noticing. I'm comfortable being direct and will occasionally challenge you, always from a place of genuine care and respect, because I think that's what it means to actually take someone seriously. I'm open to feedback, too. If something I say doesn't quite land, or if the way we're working together isn't feeling useful, I want to know. Therapy works best as a collaboration, and that means your experience of it matters to me in real time. Universal positive regard is not just a professional value for me. It's something I feel strongly about on a human level. People make sense. The choices that look confusing from the outside, the coping strategies that have stopped working, the ways we protect ourselves that sometimes make things harder, all of it makes sense in context. My job is to understand you, free of judgment, and to help you understand yourself a little better along the way. You are a real person with a real story, and I am genuinely delighted to be getting to know you.
The thing I come back to most when I think about what makes me good at this work is that I genuinely love it. Not in a performed way, but in the way that makes me look forward to sessions and stay curious about the people I work with long after they've left the room. It is never lost on me what an honor it is to be the person you're choosing to share your story with. I have a natural curiosity about people and an ability to hold complexity, to see someone as a whole person rather than a collection of symptoms or a file in a caseload. Watching the people I work with figure things out over time is one of the most satisfying things I know how to do. That said, I don't think therapy has to be so serious all of the time. I want you to be yourself in here, swear words and all, and learning to laugh at life together counts for something real. I draw on research, poems, quotes, and song lyrics, whatever feels alive and relevant to the work we're doing. Send me the TikTok that says it all and we'll talk about it. Some of my strongest convictions as a therapist are also the places where I push back against what's become conventional wisdom. I'm skeptical of the way social media, popular psychology, and cultural narratives can combine to create misleading stories about how human relationships actually work. I've watched communication frameworks go viral that, in practice, tend to end relationships rather than repair them. I've seen diagnostic labels applied in ways that close off understanding rather than open it up. I take seriously my responsibility not only to my clients, but to the people in their lives, the partners, parents, children, and friends who are part of the story even when they're not in the room. My approach is trauma-informed, which means I start from the position that most behaviors that create problems in people's lives are coping mechanisms, usually ones that made sense at some earlier point and have simply outlived their usefulness. When we can meet those behaviors with curiosity rather than judgment, something shifts. People are more capable of understanding themselves, and each other, than the more pathologizing corners of our culture tend to suggest. I believe that, and it shapes everything about how I work.
Most of the people I work with are navigating something in their close relationships, whether that's in a partnership, with their children, with their own parents, or with themselves. I specialize in the places where family gets complicated, including the mental load that accumulates quietly in partnerships, estrangement between parents and adult children, the attachment patterns that keep showing up in dating and romantic relationships, and the day-to-day work of raising children in a way that feels connected and sustainable. One thing worth knowing: you don't have to be a parent to benefit from my background in child development. Some of my most meaningful work happens with adults who are trying to make sense of their own childhoods and understand how early experiences shaped the way they show up in relationships now. I tend to be a good fit for people who are thoughtful and self-aware but feel stuck, who want a therapist who will engage with them as a full human being rather than run them through a clinical protocol. I won't tell you exactly what to do, but I will ask good questions, share what I'm noticing, and push back when I think it serves you. The right therapeutic relationship can change things in ways that are hard to anticipate from where you're standing now, and I take that possibility seriously with every person I work with.
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
Most of us have had the experience of knowing we want to do something differently and finding ourselves doing the same thing anyway. IFS helps make sense of that. It's a way of understanding the different parts of ourselves, where they came from, what they're protecting, and what they actually need. We approach each part with genuine curiosity rather than judgment, and in my experience that shift alone can change quite a lot.
Acceptance and commitment (ACT)
ACT, or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, is built around a deceptively simple idea: that a lot of our suffering comes from fighting with things we can't control, and that the energy spent on that fight is energy we could spend elsewhere. We'll work on learning to make room for difficult emotions rather than avoiding them, which includes making space for grief that often doesn't get enough of it. Alongside this, I draw on RAIN, a mindfulness practice of recognizing, allowing, investigating, and nurturing our internal experiences, as a tool for meeting whatever comes up with compassion rather than resistance. From there, we can start building toward goals that are actually grounded in what matters to you.
Child Parent Psychotherapy
Parenting is one of the hardest relationships most of us will ever navigate, and very few of us were taught how to do it well. I draw on research-backed approaches to help parents build relationships with their children that feel more connected, more cooperative, and more sustainable. We'll work on understanding what your child needs and finding ways to meet those needs that actually work for your family.
Attachment-based
The way we learned to connect in childhood has a way of showing up, often uninvited, in our adult relationships. The push and pull of a romantic partnership, the patterns that seem to repeat across different relationships, the moments where your reaction feels bigger than the situation warrants, these often trace back to early attachment experiences. Together we'll make sense of where those patterns came from and what it looks like to start shifting them in the relationships that matter most to you now.
Compassion Focused
Most of us are just looking to feel known and understood, to have someone recognize that we are doing our best while also believing we are capable of more. Being compassion focused means I operate from a place of genuine care, that I take the complexity of your experiences seriously, and that I don't pathologize the very human struggles that bring most people to therapy. I want you to leave our sessions feeling seen as a whole person, not reduced to a diagnosis or a problem to be managed.