My Approach to Therapy

Who I Work With

You may be someone who is capable, thoughtful, and accustomed to figuring things out. You hold yourself to high standards. Other people may rely on you, which can be meaningful—and also frustrating or exhausting. From the outside, your life may look “put together,” while on the inside you feel overwhelmed, like you’re just surviving or hanging on by a thread, or simply aware that something no longer quite fits.

Maybe you’re navigating a transition in your career, relationships, family, or identity and asking yourself what you actually want this next chapter of your life to look like. You might recognize patterns of perfectionism, overthinking, people-pleasing, or taking responsibility for everyone around you. Perhaps you’re successful at what you do but increasingly aware of the pressure that comes with always needing to be competent, productive, or “the one who has it together.”

Or you may simply have reached a point where understanding why you do what you do isn’t enough anymore. You want a place to look more closely at the patterns underneath it—and decide intentionally which ones you want to carry forward.

I particularly enjoy working with adults who are curious about themselves and interested in meaningful, depth-oriented therapy. Many of my clients are professionals, caregivers, leaders, business owners, parents, or other high-achieving people who spend a great deal of their lives attending to responsibilities and other people and are looking for a space where they can turn some of that attention inward.

How I Help

Therapy with me is about more than reducing symptoms, although feeling better certainly matters. I’m interested in helping you understand yourself more deeply while also using that understanding to make meaningful changes in your life.

Together, we might explore questions like:

• What matters to me now—and does the life I’m living reflect it?

• Which expectations am I choosing, and which have I inherited or internalized?

• Why do I keep finding myself in the same patterns, even when I understand them intellectually?

• How can I set boundaries, communicate more directly, and remain connected to the people I care about?

• What would it mean to make decisions from my values rather than fear, guilt, perfectionism, or other people’s expectations?

• Who am I becoming in this next season of my life?

Sometimes this work involves learning concrete skills for managing anxiety, emotions, relationships, or stress. Sometimes it means slowing down enough to understand longstanding relational patterns, competing needs, or parts of yourself that haven’t had much room to speak. Most often, it’s some combination of both.

My Approach

I bring fifteen years of clinical experience to a style that is relational, warm, direct, curious, and collaborative—with humor often finding its way into the room.

At the foundation of my work is a holistic biopsychosocial lens. Rather than viewing a symptom, diagnosis, or problem in isolation, I want to understand you as a whole person and within the context of your life. That means paying attention to the interplay of biology, emotions, relationships, developmental experiences, environment, identity, values, culture, strengths, and the larger systems and circumstances that have shaped you.

This perspective also means I’m interested in more than simply asking, “How do we make this symptom go away?” We can certainly work toward relief, but we can also get curious about what your thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and patterns may be communicating, how they developed, what purpose they may have served, and whether they are still serving you now.

I believe meaningful therapy requires a strong relationship in which you can feel genuinely understood without therapy becoming a place where you are simply validated and sent on your way. I often describe my role as applying “gentle pressure, relentlessly.” I’ll respect your autonomy, pace, and lived experience while also helping you notice inconsistencies, question old assumptions, consider different perspectives, and practice doing things differently.

I’m not particularly interested in giving you a formula for how your life is supposed to look. I am interested in helping you become clearer about what matters to you and more able to live accordingly.

My work draws from both evidence-based and depth-oriented approaches, including Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), EMDR, relational and psychodynamic therapies, interpersonal neurobiology, developmental psychology, motivational interviewing, harm reduction, and trauma-informed care.

Rather than applying one model to every person, I integrate these approaches based on the individual in front of me. We can be practical and skills-focused when that is what you need while still making room for complexity, history, relationships, identity, and the broader context of your life.

Areas of Focus

I especially enjoy working with adults navigating:

• Perfectionism, high internal expectations, and chronic self-pressure

• Anxiety, overthinking, and difficulty slowing down

• Burnout and the emotional demands of leadership, caregiving, or high-responsibility roles

• Career questions, professional identity, and reconsidering what success means

• Life transitions, changing roles or identities, and adapting to changes in health or ability

• Boundaries, assertiveness, people-pleasing, and relational patterns

• Relationship and family dynamics

• Identity, values, meaning, and personal growth

• Pregnancy, postpartum, parenthood, and other life or family transitions

• Midlife, aging, and evolving roles or identities

• Body image, chronic dieting, disordered eating, and eating disorder recovery

I also bring specialized training and experience in several areas that may intersect with the broader work clients bring to therapy.

As a Certified Eating Disorders Specialist and Consultant (CEDS-C), I have extensive experience treating eating disorders across levels of care. While eating disorder treatment is not the sole focus of my practice, this background can be especially valuable for clients whose histories with food, body image, exercise, dieting, or eating disorders intersect with the broader work they want to do in therapy. My work is grounded in Health at Every Size® (HAES) and Intuitive Eating (Tribole & Resch) principles and approaches concerns related to food, bodies, and health from a weight-inclusive, non-stigmatizing perspective.

I am also certified in Perinatal Mental Health (PMH-C) and have specialized training and experience supporting people through pregnancy, postpartum, parenthood, changing family roles, and the emotional and identity transitions that can accompany these seasons of life.

My clinical background also includes significant experience working with substance use and co-occurring mental health concerns. I approach substance use with curiosity rather than judgment, drawing from harm reduction and a holistic biopsychosocial understanding of the role substances may play in a person’s life. When substance use is part of the picture, we can explore it within the context of your emotional health, relationships, coping, environment, values, and goals rather than reducing the work to a single behavior or diagnosis.

When specialized or multidisciplinary care is needed, I collaborate with dietitians, psychiatrists, physicians, couples or family therapists, substance use treatment providers, and other professionals as appropriate.

What Therapy With Me Feels Like

You may have clear goals for therapy in mind—or you may not. You don’t need a perfectly articulated treatment goal in order to get started. In fact, sometimes the work begins with a much less tidy sense that something has changed, something isn’t working anymore, or you’re ready to understand yourself differently.

Our work will be active and collaborative. I’ll ask questions, offer reflections and observations, provide psychoeducation or teach skills when they’re useful, and help you connect patterns that may not have seemed connected before. I’ll also invite you to bring your own curiosity and willingness to experiment with what we discover.

There will be room for complexity here.

You can love your family and need stronger boundaries.

You can be grateful for the life you’ve built and want something different.

You can be highly competent and still need support.

You can understand exactly why a pattern exists and have no idea how to stop repeating it.

Therapy doesn’t require us to simplify those tensions into black-or-white answers. Often, the most interesting work begins there.

If you’re looking for a therapist who will engage deeply with you—and you’re ready to invest in understanding not only what you want to change, but how you want to live—I may be a good fit.