About Me

 I have been a therapist for five years. I’m originally from Georgia and moved to Colorado ten years ago with my family. Therapy is a second career for me, and I became a therapist after experiencing my own healing in therapy and wanting to pass that transformational experience on to others.

Most of the people I work with have experienced trauma, ranging from physical and sexual abuse as children to bullying, abusive romantic relationships, religious trauma, and the prejudice and oppression that happens when you are part of a minority or marginalized group. I view my clients as the complex and vibrant people they are, including your particular values, how you view yourself in relation to others, and how past experiences have shaped who you are today.

I work with people to get deep inside and process memories and misguided beliefs they have about themselves as a result of trauma. I do this by using EMDR as well as IFS or Internal Family Systems. I am trained in both modalities and find that they work well together.

A lot of people I see say that they have been in therapy previously and have not made a lot of progress or felt like they were just going to therapy to talk and that while that was helpful, they want to do deeper work. This was my experience as well being a client until I found a therapist who introduced me to EMDR.

EMDR stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. The idea is to go inside a traumatic memory as you are now, meaning not stuck in fight or flight mode and feeling safe and grounded in the present. When you do this, your mind is able to actually process the memory, and while the memory is of course still there, it loses its power over you, and you in turn are able to see that memory from the context of your present reality. You’re able to take that version of yourself that is trapped in the memory and bring them up to date.

And speaking of versions of ourselves, we all have versions or parts of ourselves that are trapped in the past. This is where Internal Family Systems or IFS is helpful. A lot of people first notice that they have a part that is a critic. Maybe this is a voice, feeling, or thought that you have that tells you you’re unworthy or defective.  Most people feel that they want that part to go away and spend considerable energy trying to silence it. IFS asks you to consider how that critic and other parts are trying to help you. What are they protecting you from? Once we can understand why these parts do what they do we can start to have compassion for them, and that is when healing begins.