Sometimes what we need most isn’t someone to immediately tell us how to fix what hurts. We need someone willing to sit with us long enough to truly understand it.
I work with teens, adults of all ages, and couples, and I have a particular passion for helping people navigate grief and loss, relationship difficulties, chronic pain and illness, and major life transitions. Whether you are leaving high school for college, trying to understand yourself as a young adult, building a relationship or family, adjusting to changes in your health, grieving someone or something important to you, or entering an entirely new stage of life, you don’t have to make sense of it alone.
My style as a therapist is warm, highly relational, active, and collaborative. I enjoy humor and believe there is room for laughter in therapy, even when we are doing difficult work. At the same time, I don’t want to rush you away from painful experiences simply because they are uncomfortable. When you are suffering, I want to be willing to sit there with you, understand what that suffering means to you, and help you discover what may allow something to change.
My work is primarily grounded in relational and psychodynamic therapy. Put simply, I pay close attention not only to what you tell me, but also to the patterns that emerge as we talk—the ways you experience emotions, communicate your needs, respond to closeness or conflict, and relate to yourself and other people. Sometimes patterns from earlier relationships continue to appear in our lives without us realizing it. Therapy gives us an opportunity to notice those patterns as they are happening, understand where they may have come from, and explore whether they are still serving you.
I won’t spend our sessions simply sitting back and listening. While you determine what matters to you and where you want therapy to go, I will actively participate in getting us there. I may ask questions, notice something happening between us, draw attention to a change in your expression or body language, or gently challenge us to stay with something that seems important rather than moving past it too quickly.
I also integrate Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and communication-focused interventions when they can help, including principles from Nonviolent Communication. With couples and individuals experiencing relationship difficulties, we may examine how needs and emotions are communicated, what happens during conflict, and how each person’s ways of protecting themselves can sometimes make it harder to feel heard or understood.
I have additional training in working with neuroplastic chronic pain and physical symptoms. For some people, the brain and nervous system can continue producing very real pain or physical symptoms even when those symptoms are no longer fully explained by ongoing tissue damage or disease. When appropriate, I use specialized assessment and therapeutic techniques to help clients explore whether these processes may be contributing to their symptoms and work toward reducing the fear and intensity associated with pain. This work is always approached thoughtfully and does not assume that physical symptoms are “all in your head.”
I am a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) and National Certified Counselor (NCC). I earned my Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Master of Education in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from the University of West Georgia. My experience includes counseling in both community mental health and college settings.
I don’t have one definition of what successful therapy should look like for you. Maybe you want practical coping skills. Maybe you want to understand your attachment patterns or improve the way you relate to the people you love. Maybe you want to see yourself differently, make sense of something painful, or explore much deeper questions about who you are and who you want to become. Your goals guide our work.
Most importantly, I want to listen to understand you, rather than simply listen so I can respond to you. You don’t need to convince me that what you’re experiencing is difficult or arrive already knowing what needs to change. We can begin with where you are and become curious together about what is happening, what it means, and where you want to go from here.
Outside the therapy room, I enjoy pickleball, hiking, video games, and movies. My significant other and I also share our home with two cats and a beagle, so there is rarely a shortage of personalities in the house.