Renewing Your Brilliant Hope…
…How I Can Help
As an integrative counselor, I strive to be an experienced guide for my clients as they move towards making the changes necessary to accomplish their mental health, wellness, education, and career goals. I embrace a hope-based philosophy built on four theoretical pillars: humanistic, psychoanalytic, cognitive-behavioral, and postmodern.
I believe there is an inner force for healing inside each one of us. I encourage my clients to listen for those whispers within, which bring them a sense of peace, light, and joy, and to become willing to honor those messages. Ultimately, I seek to empower you to make the changes necessary to learn from your difficulties, heal from your hurt, and move forward.
My Clients
Individuals are unique. Every sign in a client’s constellation of symptoms needs to be seen with new eyes to aid you to grow, heal, and move forward in your life.
Couples work best together when each partner is permitted to be themselves and stops trying to control the other. When there is already a break, which is often what brings a couple to counseling, they must start with rebuilding trust.
Family conflict arises when the boundaries between being true to ourselves and our obligations to each other become confused and stressed, and there is no shared goal for healing, function, and harmony.
Somewhere between Once Upon a Time and The End, we learn that life is more than just fairy tale endings. Life is often unfair, scary, and filled with pain and hardship.
The inability to accept life’s suffering, disappointments and tragedies are at the core of most mental and emotional ailments. Sometimes worsened by chemicals in the brain, these ailments become a destructive force in life. They taint how we act, twist the way we see people and circumstances, and limit our ability to find solutions. Inner chaos and overwhelm rob us of our capacity to experience peace, joy, and hope in our lives. Many people know these symptoms personally.
Challenges are to be expected when we transition from
one stage of life to the next.
When it comes to working with ADOLESCENTS, I recognize the critical importance of my relationship with both the client and the client’s parents. These two relationships form the epicenter of the teenage years. Maintaining an ethical balance between a young person’s desire for self-determination, and the adults’ concern for safety, is the sister to trust.
Moving forward to the next stage of life can be overwhelming, leading us to question ourselves, our values, and what we have always believed. I have worked with hundreds of YOUNG ADULTS (18-33), who struggle with one of the most exciting and daunting times in life.
Therapy for OLDER ADULTS is valuable and effective when held in the context of a life transition. Aging is a natural process. However, emotional pain, suffering, and loneliness are not. They are by-products of the busy, fragmented society in which we live. After a thorough assessment to rule out conditions such as Alzheimer’s Disease and other neurocognitive diagnoses, counseling for older adults can be life-enhancing.
Understanding Unique Challenges
I understand the unique challenges for people in the LGBTQ+ community, often related to self-acceptance, identity, and history, and healing from cultural trauma. More so, I understand that issues of orientation are not usually the presenting issue that leads to therapy. I recognize where LGBTQ+ factors intersect with a person's emotional, social, behavioral, and environmental challenges. I am a member of the LGBTQ-Affirmative Psychotherapist Guild of Utah.
Thirty-years in non-profit management and human services gives me both a birds-eye view and a hands-on perspective of the burdens endured by people with cancer, chronic illness, and disability, their caregivers, and their families. The ability and acuity to see beyond illness and limitations is essential to return the focus to strengths, acceptance, and empowerment. This strengths-based approach emboldens a client’s ability to cope, to mitigate physical pain, and to overcome self-imposed beliefs that lead to self-limiting behaviors.
