About Me

I was drawn to psychotherapy by a desire to have positive, fulfilling and healing relationships with family members and loved ones.  In my early adulthood, I leaned heavily upon logic and analysis and started my professional life as an aerospace engineer. In anticipation of building my own family with my partner, I earned a master’s degree in psychology from Georgia College in 1993 with a thesis analyzing the effectiveness of experiential therapy.  I earned a doctorate in clinical psychology from University of Missouri – St. Louis in 2002 with a dissertation focused upon the relationship between posttraumatic stress disorder and concepts of self complexity.  I continuously seek training and consultation in a variety of therapeutic modalities. 

Through working with clients for the past 30 years I’ve been able to observe what helps and what doesn’t help.  I’ve discovered that the most powerful approach must begin with respect for the situation bringing someone into therapy. Clients may be deciding the fate of their okay but unsatisfying marriage, barely hanging on to existence because of excruciating flashbacks or emotionally shut down as a long held survival strategy.  Merely talking about problems does not help.  I’ve amassed an arsenal of skills to help people free themselves from outdated beliefs and counterproductive fear-based strategies.

Every intervention I make is based upon deeply grounded knowledge of the way belief systems drive thoughts, emotions and physiological responses. We begin life wired to experience joy and exploration and loving relationships with others. Self-limiting beliefs were once adaptive survival strategies, beginning as attempts to predict outcomes in environments that were unpredictable or unsafe. The beliefs usually act outside of our conscious awareness yet they form core assumptive systems. They have self-reinforcing qualities affecting us on behavioral, emotional and even chemical and energetic levels. In short, they become self-fulfilling prophecies. With intuition and knowledge based upon personal and professional experience, I support clients to have honest self evaluations by tracking their somatic, energy and emotional indicators. Assumptive worlds can be uncovered and consciously updated for a more joy filled life.

My psychotherapy approach with clients might include:

• SSP and RRP (safe and sound protocol and rest and restore protocol: listening therapies gradually entraining your nervous system to set points of calm, relaxed states)

• EMDR (eye movement desensitization reprocessing: an experiential method of identifying and changing behavioral patterns and emotional conclusions learned through past experiences)

• BLAST (an approach combining EMDR components with neurolinguistic programming, hypnotherapy, and mindfulness)

• DNMS (developmental needs meeting strategy: an ego state approach involving identifying, understanding and empowering parts of self who maintain anachronistic protective strategies)

• Mindfulness (a nonjudgmental and compassionate awareness of being in the present moment rather than powerlessly stuck in the past or anxiously projected into the future)

• Somatic experiencing (a body-based approach that deepens awareness and fosters completion of physiological survival-facilitating action tendencies to allow a return to a state of relaxed vitality)

• Inner relationship focusing (bringing awareness, acceptance and resolution to a felt sense of an emotional experience rather than becoming overwhelmed by or avoidant of it)

• RTT (rapid transformational therapy: a specific type of hypnotherapy involving hypnotic induction, regression to causative memories, and replacement of limiting conclusions with empowering curative knowledge)

• Heart Healing (a specific type of hypnotherapy involving ego states and developmental repairs to foster unconditional positive regard for the self and healthy relationships with others)