I didn't start out doing this

I managed retail stores for years. Then I stayed home with my kids. When my youngest started kindergarten I asked myself what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, and I went back to school to find out.

What I found was that I liked helping people, and I really liked learning someone else's story. I also wanted to understand my own childhood and how it had shaped my adulthood. That's the honest reason I got into this work. Most people are carrying that same question around whether they've said it out loud or not.

What I believe about the work

A mentor told me once that we've built the narrative we live by around the age of ten. It comes from parents and caregivers, from teachers, from the kids we grew up around. A lot of it is negative, and almost none of it started with us. Then we spend our adult lives treating it as fact.

I think we can't become our full selves until we look at what happened to us and notice how it's still driving decisions today. The work is catching those thoughts as they happen, challenging them, and telling the difference between what you were told about yourself and what's actually true.

Nobody in the room is above anybody. I'm experiencing this with you, not grading you on it.

That matters to me more than almost anything else about how I practice. I want real rapport — you getting to know me as a provider, me getting to know you as a person. When clients tell me “you see me,” or “you understand what I've been through,” or “you're here with me,” that's the part I care about getting right.

Warm on the surface, clinical underneath

I'm casual. First session usually opens with something like “so how's your day going?” I want you comfortable, because comfortable is where people actually say the true thing.

Underneath that, the work is evidence-based. I've been doing this a long time and I've trained in a range of methods — CBT, DBT, EMDR, Motivational Interviewing, Person-Centered and Essence-Oriented Therapy — so I can pull the approach that fits the person in front of me rather than running everyone through the same track.

Outside the office

My family moved to Durango about twenty years ago. I'm a mom of three boys, married twenty-three years, and I'll take any excuse to be on the water — rafting, paddleboarding, a day at the lake. Two dogs I'm completely devoted to.

Being raised with two older brothers and then raising three sons is also the honest reason I tend to do strong work with men. I have a feel for how men carry what happened to them, and for how much they'd rather not sit down and discuss it.