Hello and welcome to my profile! I received my doctorate in Clinical Psychology in 2005 and I am a licensed Clinical Psychologist in Illinois and Nevada. I enjoy working with patients to foster personal growth and to help them feel more empowered to overcome life struggles. Our goal in working together is to help you gain insight for the future, so you can lead a more fulfilling life. My clinical interests and experience include working with eating and body image struggles, trauma, fertility/pregnancy, and relationship issues, but I also have experiences working with life transitions, depression and anxiety. Coping with trying to navigate relationships, life events and your inner self can be difficult. Together, as a team, we will focus on manifesting that change and explore how to make those changes through new ways of feeling and thinking. I view therapy as tending to a garden. We all have times when we feel withered and have not been tending enough to our own needs and relationships. We lose touch with ourselves and/or others, lacking the nourishment and support we need to flourish. Therapy is about picking the weeds out, feeding the soul and invigorating your growth to become a more healthy being. It is not easy to ask for help or to take the first step to seek a more fulfilling and happier life. My goal as a therapist is to harness that courage and work towards a better understanding of yourself and cultivate strategies to lead a more integrated life.
What can clients expect to take away from sessions with you?
Our first session is a time for us to begin to develop our connection. I like to spend the majority of our time together learning about you and what brought you to this point of seeking therapy. We will spend a few minutes at the beginning going over any questions you may have and addressing important items such as confidentiality. The rest of our time together will be creating a narrative of who you are and starting to build our relationship. The first session can be more structured than other sessions in that I might be asking a lot of questions to get a more global understanding of what is going on and so we can identify collaborative a focus for our work together.
What treatment methods and tools do you utilize?
I tailor my treatment methods to fit each individual person. I incorporate an psychodynamic, CBT (Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy), DBT (Dialectical-Behavior Therapy), emotion-focused, ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) and experiential modalities into my work. I believe the therapeutic relationship is the key to fostering change and through that relationship I will use other tools to help us explore and change the way you perceive, feel, and act in life experiences to create a more fulfilling life. I also think it is important to enhance your understanding and knowledge or your own strengths and ways to cope that tend to be overshadowed by life stressors and negative self-talk. I do believe we all are capable of truly understanding ourselves and living life to the fullest.
Explain to clients what areas you feel are your biggest strengths.
I have always been actively involved in empowering people to have a better relationship with their body and mind. I have experience not only working with eating disorders in different therapeutic settings (PHP/IOP programs, outpatient and college counseling), but also have participated in doing a lot of outreach/curriculum for schools and companies with regards to eating and body image. I believe that reclaiming trust in your body by understanding your body story, grieving the trauma related to that story, and working to develop a new way of being in your body can help heal the connection with the mind. Then, you can work on finding ways of embracing life and focusing on joy again. Thus, I incorporate both Healthy at Every Size and Body Trust programs into my work with body image.