LMFT, 11 years of experience
Frequently rebooked
It's an honor to get to do this work with you. I hope to provide you with an experience where you feel seen and heard as you discover your path to healing. I will be present, engaged and supportive as you navigate the work, and I will provide feedback and "homework" to ensure that you are moving toward your goals.
In our first session we will begin to develop our relationship--built on trust and compassion. Some of the basic ingredients to build this relationship require my consistent and reliable presence, my attention and focus--on you and your needs, and my expertise to understand you and your distress, and to offer you tools to learn to use for meaningful change and growth in your daily life. We will often begin our work developing your genogram (this is sort of like a family tree, but goes deeper to explore family patterns, dynamics and issues that may travel through the generations). The genogram provides the space for clients to begin to tell the story of their family, thereby offering important information that is specific to each client's experience in the world. I believe that our family culture (everything from how our family talks about--or doesn't talk about--love, gender roles, money, boundaries and so on and so forth) has tremendous influence on how we perceive the world and ourselves in it. The wonderful thing about examining and discovering these patterns is that we can determine which you want to continue to carry forward and which you want to shift to create change and healing that you feel is essential to your overall well-being.
Some of the feedback that I receive from clients regarding my strengths as a therapist include being an active therapist - rather than listening with little to no feedback, I guide the client with open-ended questions to incite deeper explorations. I also understand when a client needs space to vent, and create a safe space for clients to dig into their challenges. I also offer homework to focus on between sessions that aim to reinforce discoveries and insight developed in our sessions. Tailored to you and your goals, applicable in your daily life.
The "dream client" shows up motivated: what clients do between sessions can be more essential to their growth and healing than sometimes what we do in sessions. I offer homework regularly to help clients develop greater insight and to apply it in their daily lives. As much as I sometimes wish I had a magic wand, I do not: therapy is work, and it requires both/all of us to do that work. Motivation can waver, and I'll be there to support you in accessing the internal motivation that will support you to move forward in healing and growth.
I aim to support clients to better understand the landscape of their emotions--we might work to build an emotion vocabulary, explore roots of emotions, and/or discover how to manage emotions for healthier expression.
Sometimes as humans we can lose sight of our strengths and downplay them. By getting to know you, I offer objective feedback on what I perceive as some of your strengths as well as offer strategies to support your awareness and recognition them.
This model helps me to help clients identify, and better understand, how their thinking can become unhelpful and even harmful to their overall wellbeing. I also use many strategies from CBT for "homework" so that clients can apply their discoveries and insights from sessions in daily life.
I work with the whole family to explore how unhelpful patterns show up and can create disconnection and anxiety. I promote an environment of respect, fairness, understanding, and flexibility.
In couples counseling, we often look back at the family system to discover how we learned about relationships as well as how we receive love and attach to others. We explore how we have been shaped and how that shows up in present day relationships--we work to strengthen and reinforce the positives and work to shift the negative or unhelpful attitudes, beliefs and expectations we bring to our most intimate relationships.
5 ratings with written reviews
June 2, 2025
I have worked with Theresa for a number of years through many difficult phases of my life. Her natural authenticity, engagement, good humor and keen insight goes a very long way in helping one feel empowered to work through dark times and find/walk the path to bring about positive change.
May 1, 2025
She is a wonderful person, and she allows me to open up and be myself. I couldn’t ask for a more authentic human being to talk to to help me figure out my life. She has a way of helping me come up with all the answers that I already know; and inquisitive enough to bring up questions I have for myself that I didn’t know I should be asking. 10/10
March 28, 2025
Theresa has given valuable feedback and interventions to my husband and I to grow closer to one another and we have thoroughly enjoyed working with Theresa so far!