About Me

Training and Degrees: I received my bachelors in science in Marketing from Clemson University.  While at Clemson I worked as an assistant football chaplain and was in charge of athlete mentoring and spiritual development.  After several years working with college athletes I decided to pursue a Master degree in Counseling Psychology from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology.  While earning my degree I worked with men struggling with addiction, trauma, and abuse at Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission.  After completing my degree and clinical internship in 2013 I opened my private practice and began working at Opal: Food and Body Wisdom, an eating disorder treatment facility in the U-District.  At Opal, I helped clients understand and transform their relationship to movement, exercise, and sports and began creating an integrative movement and body psychotherapy.  In 2016 I moved into full-time private practice and became a W.I.T.S Certified Personal Trainer to supplement my work with the body and movement. In 2018 I finished a trauma certification in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). All these experiences have deeply shaped my understanding of the complex and diverse challenges that each of my clients are hoping to address.  I am a Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LH 60604834) and am a registered service provider in the state of Washington.

Therapeutic Approach: Over the years, I’ve experienced psychotherapy as a means to heal and change a variety of ills in body and mind. We are complex beings whose health and vitality is deeply interconnected and intertwined with our environment and relationships. Although our mental life is extraordinarily important to analyze, it is only one part of a larger system that we will explore together. A transformative psychotherapy includes the whole self: mind, body, and spirit. 

With this in mind, our initial direction in therapy will be in learning how to listen, understand, and work with these different parts of you. How do these parts relate? How do they push and pull against each other? What brings them anxiety and what brings them relief? How are these parts of you impacted by the relationships in your life? 

Instead of getting bogged down with judgements, I want each person to learn to look and listen more deeply to the behaviors, emotions, thoughts, and bodily sensations that accompany them. Every one of these expressions are breadcrumbs that will help us understand your past and your present. You are who you are for a reason. You struggle with the things you do for a reason. Our initial work is to help you understand this and why it makes sense in the context of the environment you grew up in.

Once we get an understanding of these dynamics, we can begin to explore how this knowledge can help you grow and become the person you long to be moving forward. True transformation always involves understanding AND a process of development. We see this truth when we look at how the body grows (i.e…cardio/weightlifting), and we see it when we look at how the mind grows. In order to develop, we must understand a problem and then begin to explore and practice new ways of living. This involves developing areas of weakness and encouraging places of strength, gifting, and competence.

The goal of psychotherapy is to help you develop and grow into more of who you are…not to make you into someone or something else. I count it a great privilege to get to witness and walk with you as we journey together.