(she/her)
New to Grow
I’m a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW) and doctor of social work with over 5 years of experience in the mental health field across a variety of settings, including primary care and psychiatric hospitals. I work with adults and teens navigating relationship challenges, life transitions, parenting stress, work-life balance, and the impact of past experiences. I value creating a supportive, collaborative space where clients feel genuinely heard and understood. My approach blends insight-oriented therapy with practical skill-building to help clients feel more grounded, connected, and confident in managing life’s challenges. I also bring humor into sessions when appropriate, as a way to support comfort, connection, and perspective during difficult work.
In our first session, we’ll take time to get to know each other and begin understanding what brings you to therapy. I’ll ask questions about your current concerns, relevant history, and what you’re hoping to get out of our work together, but we’ll move at a pace that feels comfortable for you. We’ll also talk through your goals for therapy and start identifying what support might look like moving forward. There’s no pressure to have everything figured out, this session is about building understanding and creating a space where you feel safe, heard, and supported. You can also expect space to ask questions about the therapy process and my approach, so we can make sure it feels like a good fit. By the end of the session, we’ll begin outlining a general direction for treatment while keeping things flexible as we continue.
My greatest strength as a therapist is my ability to create a strong, supportive therapeutic relationship where clients feel genuinely understood and safe to explore even difficult emotions and experiences. I balance depth and practicality by integrating insight-oriented work with evidence-based approaches like CBT and solution-focused strategies, helping clients not only understand their patterns but also build actionable skills for change. I am attuned to each client’s emotional experience and pace sessions in a way that supports regulation, insight, and meaningful progress without overwhelming the process. I also draw from experience in diverse clinical settings, including primary care and psychiatric hospitals, which allows me to support clients with a wide range of severity and complexity. Clients often appreciate my collaborative style, my ability to normalize and reduce shame around their struggles, and my use of humor when appropriate to create comfort and connection. My goal is to help clients feel more grounded, self-aware, and empowered in their relationships, emotions, and daily functioning.
I work best with adults and teens who are navigating relationship concerns, life transitions, parenting stress, work-life balance difficulties, and the emotional impact of past experiences, including veterans and those connected to military life. Many of the clients I support are feeling overwhelmed, emotionally stuck, or unsure of how to move forward, but are motivated to better understand themselves and create meaningful change. A central part of my approach is that I deeply value the therapeutic relationship as the foundation of effective therapy. I aim to create a space where clients feel genuinely heard, supported, and not judged, so they can safely explore both their struggles and their strengths. I believe healing often happens within a trusting and collaborative relationship where clients feel comfortable being fully themselves. In addition to insight-oriented work, I also focus on helping clients build practical skills to navigate daily challenges. This includes tools for emotional regulation, communication, coping with stress, managing anxiety or depressive symptoms, and improving relationship dynamics. I work collaboratively to ensure that skills are tailored to each client’s unique needs and feel realistic to apply outside of session. I also incorporate humor when appropriate, as it can be a powerful way to reduce tension, build connection, and help clients feel more grounded when discussing difficult topics. I find that moments of lightness can coexist with deep emotional work and often support resilience and perspective.
Humanistic
In my work, humanistic therapy is used as the foundation of my clinical style. I prioritize emotional attunement, presence, and a strong therapeutic relationship, especially when clients are dealing with trauma, anxiety, or feeling overwhelmed. I often slow the session down to focus on what the client is experiencing in the moment, using empathic reflection and gentle exploration to help them access and name emotions rather than staying only in problem-solving. This creates space for clients to feel understood and more regulated before moving into skills or cognitive work. I also integrate unconditional positive regard by holding a nonjudgmental stance toward all parts of the client’s experience, which helps reduce shame and defensiveness and supports deeper processing over time. Overall, I use humanistic therapy as the relational “base,” while layering in CBT, DBT, and grounding interventions when clinically appropriate.
Solution Focused Brief Treatment
In my work, I use solution-focused therapy as a brief, goal-oriented approach that helps clients identify strengths, clarify what they want to be different, and take small, realistic steps toward change. I focus on helping clients shift from problem saturation to possibility by exploring exceptions—times when the problem is less intense or not happening—and what is already working, even in small ways. I often use scaling questions to help clients track progress and define what “a little better” would look like in concrete terms. I also help clients set clear, achievable goals that are grounded in their own language and values, then collaboratively identify practical next steps they feel ready to try between sessions. This approach emphasizes building momentum rather than analyzing problems in depth.
Cognitive Behavioral (CBT)
I use CBT as a structured, evidence-based approach to help clients understand the connection between thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, and how these patterns contribute to distress. I help clients identify automatic thoughts and core beliefs that may be reinforcing anxiety, depression, or self-criticism, and then collaboratively examine the accuracy and helpfulness of those thoughts. I often use Socratic questioning to support clients in developing more balanced and flexible thinking patterns rather than simply replacing thoughts. I also integrate behavioral interventions, such as activity scheduling, behavioral activation, exposure-based strategies when appropriate, and coping skill development, to help clients build real-world changes alongside cognitive shifts.
Psychoanalytic
I use a psychoanalytic-informed approach to help clients explore unconscious patterns, early relational experiences, and how past dynamics may be influencing current thoughts, emotions, and relationships. I pay attention to recurring themes, defenses, and patterns that show up in the client’s narrative and in the therapeutic relationship itself. I often help clients explore what feels unspoken or emotionally charged beneath their immediate concerns, including internal conflicts, attachment wounds, and relational expectations shaped by earlier experiences. I also use interpretation carefully and collaboratively, helping clients make connections between present difficulties and earlier life experiences when it feels emotionally safe and clinically appropriate. Transference and relational dynamics in the room are sometimes explored to deepen insight into how the client experiences others and themselves.