Licensed to practice in Virginia and accepts 11 insurances. Specializes in Anxiety, Depression, Self Esteem and 9 more.
New to Grow
I have always been interested in people and their stories. Having grown up in Virginia, I got my bachelor’s degree in psychology from Bridgewater College and a master’s degree in social work from Virginia Commonwealth University. I have experience across a wide variety of settings, including inpatient care, community mental health, and partial hospitalization programs. In these roles, I have supported clients facing challenges such as depression, anxiety, complex trauma, self-harm, suicidal ideation, grief, emotional regulation, attachment concerns, and difficulties with boundaries and communication. I am passionate about helping clients build the skills to live as their most authentic and healthy selves. I believe that by fostering an environment of trust and safety, clients can fully realize their own power and achieve more than they ever thought possible.
I prioritize first building rapport with my clients and getting to better understand their experiences, values, and ways of understanding the world. I also want to make sure clients know what to expect out of the therapeutic process and relationship. Our first session will involve discussions of consent, healthy boundaries, and my role as a therapist as well as a lot of questions to get to know you, your history, and your therapy goals.
My biggest strength as a therapist is that I genuinely love to hear people's stories. I provide a warm, non-judgemental environment with a focus on truly trying to understand your situation as you see it. I have been through my own therapy and can empathize with how difficult the process can feel. I work to bring both my professional experience and training as well as my own lived experiences in to best empathize and support my clients while maintaining healthy therapeutic boundaries. Whenever possible, I love helping clients better understand their brains, behaviors, and evidence based options for meeting their goals. This sometimes includes providing homework between sessions, whether it is reading handouts, completing worksheets, watching videos, or journaling exercises.
I am very passionate about helping adults build authentic lives. I love helping people learn to how to speak up for themselves, hold healthy boundaries, and clarify their values. I have worked a lot with clients on building self-worth and learning to speak to themselves with more compassion (without sacrificing accountability). I also have an interest in supporting clients who are deconstructing or working through religious trauma. That said, I'm willing to work with anyone who is willing to be open and is looking for change. Having worked in a variety of settings, I have experience with depression, anxiety, bipolar disorders, complex trauma, self-harm, suicidal ideation, grief, emotional regulation issue, attachment issues, and more. If something you are facing goes beyond my skillset to ethically and effectively treat, I'll work with you to find a provider/resources who can.
ACT is all about getting in tune with your values. When we have clarity on our values, we feel happier, healthier, and more confident in our choices and are less likely to be pressured by others into decisions we later regret. This does not mean that all indecision, emotional conflict, or regret is eliminated. It means we are more effective in making decisions with the information we have in front of us than honor who we are (or who we want to become). ACT also teaches skills which are very helpful for managing anxiety, unhelpful self-self talk, and thought spirals.
Probably my all time favorite therapy modality. Originally developed to treat borderline personality disorder, DBT has undergone a huge amount of research which has shown it to be effective for a broad range of disorders and treatment concerns. DBT teaches us balance in all things, paired with a lot of practical steps on how to change our behaviors and manage our emotions. The main areas DBT covers includes interpersonal effectiveness (becoming assertive while preserving relationships), mindfulness (building our awareness of ourselves and decreasing reactivity), emotion regulation (learning to understand and manage our emotions), and distress tolerance (healthy ways to deal with hard emotions in situations where we don't have the power to change what is upsetting us). You'll probably hear me talk about "dialectics" a lot. This is the idea that 2 things can be true at the same time, even if they feel like they should contradict. For example, "You are doing your best, and you need to do better." You can be trying your hardest in good faith and still need to learn new skills and get support in order to reach your goals. Learning to embrace "and" over "but" does so much to build our resilience.
CBT is a well researched and effective form of treatment which I find helpful to use in tandem with other approaches. I specifically like pulling from CBT when it comes to challenging automatic negative thoughts. These are the thoughts our brains auto-generate at us which reflect our beliefs about ourselves, others, and the world that we have absorbed from our families, cultures, and experiences across our lives. Think of that scene in Inside Out 2 with the glowing strands. CBT gives us methods for rewiring our brains to not passively accept these thoughts as truth and begin speaking in a more fair and measured way to and about ourselves. I typically approach this by first learning about these thoughts and beliefs, where they come from, and how they effect you. I hold space with you for these feelings and validate the valid (that it makes sense to feel what you feel) without reinforcing what is unhealthy or unhelpful about the thoughts. This is when we bring in the challenging and reframing.
It is a humbling experience any time a client trusts me enough to share about a traumatic experience- even if they don't realize it "counts" as trauma. I do all that I can to honor that trust, which includes making sure the therapeutic space remains emotionally and physically safe. While it is my job to push clients, I will never push someone to share information they are not ready to disclose. I also do all I can to keep judgement out of the space, to include helping clients set down their own unhealthy self-judgement. From there, it is about empowering the individual to figure out what makes the most sense for their own healing.
Eclectic therapy means pulling from various treatment methods, mixing and matching based on what makes sense for that client's needs. In addition between pulling from ACT, DBT, CBT, strengths-based, and trauma informed approaches, I also pull tools from IFS (internal family systems), EFT (emotion freedom technique), and polyvagal theory. Whenever I learn something new in my continuing education, it gets added to my toolbox.