There’s a vein of mental health that I know really well.
It’s the place where life is technically functioning, but it feels like a lot of work to keep it that way. You’re competent, thoughtful, and probably pretty good at holding things together. From the outside, things may look stable. Inside, though, there’s a lot of effort going into staying afloat.
Many of the people who find their way to my work grew up in families where they quietly learned how to be the responsible one.
Maybe you were the “easy” child.
Maybe a sibling needed a lot of attention.
Maybe your parents were well-intentioned but emotionally limited.
However it happened, you may have learned early how to read the room, manage yourself, and keep things from getting harder than they already were.
Those adaptations often produce impressive adults. People who are perceptive, capable, independent, and thoughtful.
They can also produce adults who are tired.
Tired of overthinking.
Tired of carrying so much responsibility.
Tired of feeling like they have to figure everything out alone.
This is the territory I work in most often: helping adults who grew up with emotionally immature parents understand the roles they learned to play in their families and begin to loosen the patterns that came with those roles.
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One of my favorite teachers once told me:
“Your mind is like a dangerous neighborhood. Don’t go in there alone.”
That line has stuck with me for years.
Our minds can generate incredible insight, but they can also produce an endless swirl of rumination, self-criticism, and second-guessing. Many of the clients I work with are deeply thoughtful people who have spent years trying to think their way out of problems that actually require something deeper than analysis.
Part of my role is helping you find your way through that fog - listening for both the part of you that longs for change and the part that’s quietly trying to keep things exactly the same.
Both deserve attention.
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Our work together usually includes a mix of:
understanding the family roles that shaped you
exploring the roots of the patterns you’re living with now
developing practical ways to move toward the life you actually want
I draw from several approaches that focus on deep, lasting change rather than surface-level coping strategies. These include:
Coherence Therapy and memory reconsolidation, which help update emotional learnings that were formed earlier in life.
Parts work, which allows us to understand the different internal voices or drives that shape your experience.
And clinical hypnosis, which can help access the deeper layers of the mind where many long-standing patterns live.
These approaches share something important in common: they respect that your current patterns made sense at one point in your life. Therapy isn’t about fighting those patterns. It’s about understanding them well enough that your mind can reorganize around something new.
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My own life has had its fair share of spikes and valleys.
For a long time I was something of a chameleon, adapting to what other people needed from me. I was pretty good at it. I could shape-shift to serve different situations without fully noticing the toll it was taking on me.
Burnout eventually has a way of revealing these patterns.
Along the way I’ve had a fairly eclectic professional path. My first job was at a wholesale plant nursery — which is ironic because I can’t even keep the aloe plant on my kitchen windowsill alive. Another early job was waitressing at my family’s restaurant, which the Washington Post once reviewed as serving “good, old-fashioned American grub,” which was a pretty accurate assessment.
My husband and I have also launched (and closed) three different businesses over the years. I don’t carry shame about that. If anything, I carry a healthy respect for how complicated building something meaningful can be.
I’ve also worked across five institutions of higher education, which fed what I affectionately call my Credentialing Gremlin — that inner voice that insists you just need one more piece of paper before you’re allowed to exist.
In other words, I know a thing or two about reinvention.
Both the internal kind and the external kind.
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Community Matters to Me
None of us change in isolation.
I live in intentional community — cohousing — on the banks of the Poudre River in Fort Collins, Colorado. It’s a place where neighbors share meals, help each other out, and generally attempt the radical experiment of actually knowing the people who live next door.
I also spend part of the year in Frederick, Maryland, a historic town with a strong sense of local life.
Despite being a strong introvert (and someone who finds travel mildly horrifying), I value gathering spaces — women’s groups, yoga classes, consultation groups, and other places where humans come together to think and grow.
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I'm a homebody, through and through
Most people love to travel, but not me (it sort of horrifies me), so I immerse myself in women’s groups, yoga classes (well, my current crush is Nia), masterminds, consultation groups, and other forums to gather – all this despite my strong introversion.
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Land Acknowledgement
It’s important for me to offer respect for the land where I work. In Colorado, it is the ancestral home of the Arapahoe, Cheyenne, and Ute Nations and peoples. In Maryland, the Susquehannock, the Piscataway, and the Tuscarora were native to the area where I live and work. I honor and recognize the Indigenous people as original stewards of this land, and I hold sacred my own responsibility in practicing inclusion in both my personal and professional life.
More Important Details
I operate from a core foundation of beliefs that center your lived experience and advance these values:
Pro human rights
Pro-choice
Fat-positive (Health at Every Size aligned)
Neurodivergent-affirming
Affirming of all relationship structures
Asexual and aromantic-affirming
Spiritually open and non-dogmatic
Autonomy-honoring
Intersectional feminist
Systemically and relationally aware
Some random facts about me beyond my work:
My family tree looks like that meme of the guy with the cigarette dangling from his fingers as he gestures wildly to the board with erratic lines everywhere that defy logic.
I love audiobooks and podcasts. I’m a shameless namedropper when it comes to writers, especially writers who are also therapists, and when I come across writers who are also therapists who are also podcasters, I swoon.
I’ve been married for 30+ years. My partner and I have two 20-something kids who are lovely humans.
Working Together
If you recognize yourself in some of the patterns described above — the responsibility, the overthinking, the sense of carrying a lot on your own — therapy can be a place to begin shifting those patterns.
You don’t have to keep navigating the terrain of your mind by yourself.