Hello. I am a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) based in Virginia. With over 26 years of clinical experience, I support clients to access their inner resources and strengthen coping skills so they can design the life they seek. My work focuses on turning emotions into wisdom (emotion regulation), managing stress (distress tolerance), and teaching others how to treat us (interpersonal effectiveness). These skills can help us deepen the meaningful connections with loved ones and improve the overall quality of our lives.
In our first session, we will introduce ourselves and begin to explore what challenges and strengths you bring to our therapeutic work. We will establish a mutual goal of reconnecting to your awesome self.
As a licensed therapist (informed by DBT) for many years, I have a dialectical perspective that allows me to navigate acceptance/change, reason/emotion, left brain/right brain, guilt/resentment, and taking care of self/taking care of others.
I enjoy working with adults of all ages who have recognized that they may be getting in their own way in trying to build a life worth living. I love working with clients who want to improve themselves in order to be the best parent they can be to their children. I believe that we are all born awesome and then we go through childhood. The ways we coped with our childhoods become the autopilot coping patterns of our adult lives. We can reconnect to our awesome selves.
I was trained in DBT by Marsha Linehan in 1997. I have incorporated coping skills (i.e. distress tolerance, emotion regulation, core mindfulness, and interpersonal effectiveness) and the dialectical perspective of acceptance and change into all of my work with clients.