Frequently Asked Questions

This is a question worth sitting with, and I'm glad you're asking it. The honest answer is that readiness looks different for everyone, and part of what we do early in our work together is assess exactly that.

You don't need to feel ready in the sense of having no fear or reservations. Most people who do this work carry some ambivalence into it. What matters more is that you have a genuine desire to understand yourself more deeply, that you're willing to be curious about your own experience, and that your life has enough stability to support the process.

That's also why we don't dive straight into trauma processing. The early phase of our work is intentionally focused on building internal and external resources, and strengthening your ability to stay grounded when difficult things come up, so that when we do go deeper, you're not doing it alone and without support.

That's a common thing I hear from new clients, and it makes sense. A lot of therapy stays at the surface level, processing what happened this week or managing symptoms as they come up. That can be helpful, but it often doesn't touch the deeper patterns underneath.

The work I do is different because we're not just talking about your experiences, but actively engaging them. IFS helps us identify the parts of you that formed around painful experiences and are still running old survival strategies that no longer serve you. EMDR works directly with how traumatic memories are stored in your nervous system, helping to reduce their grip. Story Work takes specific experiences of harm and helps you make meaning of them in a new way.

Together, these approaches go underneath the symptoms to address what's actually driving them. Most clients describe a meaningful shift and begin noticing that the patterns themselves begin to change.

Online therapy works much like in person therapy, but offers many conveniences that make it an ideal scenario for most individuals. Online therapy allows you to meet without the trouble of a commute at any location you feel comfortable. Prior to our appointment, you will receive a reminder text and email that will give you a link to my Zoom waiting room where I will let you in at the time of our scheduled appointment. I encourage all of my clients to secure their space by ensuring privacy, comfort, and that their technology is working properly. If we have any trouble during your session, I will provide troubleshooting and alternative options to ensure we are able to meet as scheduled.

Story Work is a process developed by Dan Allender through his work with the Allender Center and their Narrative Focused Trauma Care (NFTC) certificate program. It centers on engaging with specific stories of harm that have shaped how you relate to yourself and others. The goal of Story Work Consultation is to explore these formative stories, identify the impact of the harm, deepen your grief over what you've experienced, and reclaim what the impact of these stories has cost you. Grief is often avoided in our culture, so this process opens the possibility for healing and new ways of showing up in your life and relationships.

While Story Work can be therapeutic, it is not intended to replace therapy or clinical counseling. If, during our work together, it becomes clear that you may benefit from clinical care, I will help connect you to appropriate resources. Although I am a trained and licensed professional counselor, when engaging in Story Work Consultation, I will not be acting in my capacity as a licensed counselor. To maintain clarity in our relationship, I will not be able to work with you in a clinical counseling role.

While I appreciate how the work I do with my clients is connected to their external relationships, I choose to focus my efforts on helping the individual and exploring how their work can then integrate into their relationships. In some situations, I will assist in connecting clients with a couples or family therapist if this is a need.

I do not work with children or adolescents. My practice specializes in working with adults starting at 19 years old and up.

Each of these approaches does something distinct, and in my experience they work better together than any one of them does alone.

IFS (Internal Family Systems) gives us a framework for understanding the different parts of you that developed in response to painful experiences. Rather than fighting those parts or trying to eliminate them, we learn to understand what they're protecting and help them find rest. This becomes the relational foundation for everything else we do.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) works directly with how traumatic memories are stored in the brain and nervous system. Where IFS helps us understand and relate to our parts, EMDR helps us reprocess the memories those parts are organized around so they lose their charge.

NFTC (Narrative Focused Trauma Care) or Story Work zooms out to look at the larger arc of your story. It helps you understand how specific experiences of harm have shaped how you see yourself, relate to others, and move through the world. This approach opens up space for grief, which is often where real healing begins.

Used together, these three approaches address trauma at the level of the mind, the body, and the narrative. This is why clients often experience a depth of change that they haven't found elsewhere.

Progress in trauma work rarely looks like a straight line, and it often doesn't feel the way people expect it to at first. Early on, progress might look like simply feeling safer in our sessions, or beginning to notice patterns you weren't aware of before. That growing awareness is doing more than it might seem.

Over time, clients typically describe things like: feeling less hijacked by their emotional responses, being able to stay present in relationships in ways that used to feel impossible, noticing the inner critic getting quieter, or finding that memories that once felt overwhelming have lost some of their weight.

The deeper markers of progress are often relational and embodied. You stop bracing for rejection before it happens, you feel more at home in your own skin, or you find yourself making choices that feel like yours rather than just reactions to old wounds.

That's ultimately what we're working toward. Not just symptom relief, but a genuine shift in how you experience yourself and the people around you.

I do not take insurance, but I am happy to offer you a superbill upon request. See my Investment page for more information.