Relationships can be hard to maintain, build, nurture, and even break. Handling your emotions on top of all of that adds to your challenges. Therapy can be a life changing outlet for you to organize your thoughts and feelings to figure out what your next steps can be! Whether you are new to therapy, or familiar with the process, I'm happy to provide a new perspective with the aims of helping you with your issues. I'm hear to listen to you and your story. I specialize in helping with anxiety, depression, and relationships through a culturally sensitive lens. I believe in learning life skills and seeing how they can be integrated in your day-to-day life. Anyone can receive therapy and ANY point in life. Your story is unique and therefore, your therapy is unique! I'm ready to listen and help empower you to make meaningful changes in your life. Associate Counselor of FreeStyle Therapy & EMDR Group LLC. Supervised by Cassandra Holt LPCC 11336

I think that all people want human connections in various ways, shapes, and forms. Therapy is a place to be both your hype-person, and, as a thoughtful challenger to your questions that don't have clear answers - as many answers in life usually are. Therapists jobs are to help you feel heard AND hold up a mirror and be a sounding board for thoughts you may have never said aloud.

I live with the use of metaphors for almost everything. It's my way of relating to people and providing alternative perspectives that may better fit what you are feeling. Sometimes, people just need to hear the right metaphor or comparison to feel seen and heard. I try my best to find what fits for you. Also, I am an avid cat-person.

There is so much validity in feelings of stress, anxiety, sadness, anger, and other emotions that are typically considered "negative". Therapy can seem like we want to push all of those feelings away. In reality, I like to address both sides and support those feelings. You have every right to feel frustrated with someone or something who did you wrong, AND, you also deserve to give yourself grace and feel confidence in your decisions. It's ultimately up to you to decide what final feeling you want to end up on.

I remember being a child and watching the rain drops run down the car window. I came up with imaginary stories of drops "chasing" and "eating" other drops. It helped passed the time and also made me forget any responsibilities, even though they were kid responsibilities. Sometimes we forget to enter this state of "mindfulness" and we have lost appreciation for our kid-brain that was able to tap into this. My goal is using MBCT is to help you tap into this again and help you slow down and place those responsibilities and stressors on hold, just for a little bit, so we can calm ourselves before we get back into business.

Neurodivergence is a spectrum with a lot of degrees of expression. Naturally, therapy has many degrees of modes to help people. I work with clients with ADHD by finding which tools work best for you, new or old, and fine-tuning them! I think a great starting place for working with ADHD clients is through education so we can start at the same point and understand ourselves better. From there, we can match us with the right tools to help us emotionally, cognitively, and behaviorally!

I like to think of EMDR like that one Old-Spice commercial: "Look down, look up, where are you?... What's in your hand? Back at me... Look again, the tickets are now diamonds!" While you are remembering things from mild discomfort up to extreme levels of distress and pain - your eyes, and therefore some part of your brain, is preoccupied. Generally this can bring up new feelings and emotions associated with your memories of discomfort and may bring feelings of healing.