About ME

The thing about body image is it often has nothing to do with our body. Body image distress often comes from feeling as if others are more worthy than us. More worthy of dessert, of wearing clothes that make us feel good, of simply existing. I practice body neutrality, which  about neither loving nor hating your body. Its aim is to reduce the emphasis on physical appearance as a component of a person's self-worth and acknowledges that a person's body is only a small part of who they are. 

I have worked in the eating disorder community for most of my career. Too often I worked with clients who have felt dismissed by a provider about the severity of their eating disorder - but if your relationship with food causes pain and you find it hard to live in your body, you deserve relief. No matter what box society puts us in. Eating disorders come in all different shapes and sizes, and individuals recovering from an eating disorder deserve to know they will be safe, respected, and never told they need to change their body in our work.

Trauma, like humans, comes in all shapes and sizes. When you experience a trauma, it changes how you view the world and often makes you feel less safe. Our work will include identifying how events in your life have impacted you and how we can teach your body that it is safe in the here and now. Trauma work is led at your comfort and at your pace. We don't get to choose what happens to us, so we deserve to choose how we heal.

No, the point of therapy isn't for me to tell you that everything is your mother's fault. But it is a place to work towards differentiation - which is the ability to recognize your realistic dependence on others, including your family, but to learn the skills to stay calm and clear headed enough in the face of conflict, criticism, and rejection. Many of us feel immense pressure to be or to look exactly how our family told us to be. Together we will examine ways to hold boundaries in relationships without continuing to light ourselves our fire just to keep our family warm.

After working on a military base exclusively with pregnant and post-partum moms and navigating pregnancy and motherhood myself, I love to work with parents navigating how to be the parent they perhaps wish they had their selves. I work with clients to examine their family history in order to define who they do and do not want to be as a parent. And also am here to cheer you on because raising small humans is hard.

It would be a lot easier if any of us learned about healthy relationships in school instead of calculating the circumference of a shape, but here we are. Boundaries are often confusing, simply because many of us might have come from families where having boundaries and using your voice was simply not okay. I am passionate about teaching clients how to identify what is okay with them and what is not and using this to create ideal relationships.