LPC, 26 years of experience
I have served children, teens, and adults, age 2 years and older and I have experience at all levels of care from community based, outpatient, partial hospitalization, and residential treatments. My joy is to help others gain healing through using their strengths, supportive relationships, and various healthy methods of expressing themselves. I specialize in play and expressive therapy, including using art, sandtray, and therapeutic games.
Generally the first session includes the young person and the parents in a team meeting to determine the problem areas and initial recommendations for treatment. By the end of session one, we have worked on goal setting and initial coping and self control skills.
If you are looking for an honest, trustworthy, and talented therapist to help your child get through life's challenges, I have concentrated on children's mental health treatment, play therapy, and focus on the family for over 25 years. My approach is humanistic or non-directive therapy, so children gain self confidence and healing using their natural self expression tools of play, art, and practice.
I am here to help you become aware of your feelings, thoughts, and actions to bring about change. If your child or teen has challenges in the areas of school, home, and/or behavior, I can usually help bring about positive results within weeks. I have training in play and experiential therapies as well as more classical approaches, so it is easy to engage most clients in the process.
Play and other expressive therapies vary per age. They are a more natural mode of expressing feelings and building trust through play, art, music expression. Although person centered therapy takes more time, deeper issues are able to be uncovered and dealt with.
Parents are often very important partners for helping children and teenagers get better.
To improve engagement, trust, and self confidence, strengths of the client and family are often a focus.
Creating a safe space assists the client to feel comfortable expressing their emotions, which leads to greater confidence in themselves and expressing themselves to others in their life.