About Me
I have been a practicing therapist in Austin, Texas for over eleven years. My specialties include relationships, grief, transition, depression, anxiety, self-care, work-life effectiveness, religious damage, and spirituality. I provide individual, relationship, group, and couples therapy using a treatment approach that is collaborative and relationship based. I have extensive training in insight-oriented therapy, psychoanalytic therapy, interpersonal psychotherapy, gestalt therapy, mind-body integration, and mindfulness-based treatments.
I am a writer and public speaker on topics such as emotional resilience, spirituality, work-life balance, and self-care. I am a board member of the Austin Group Psychotherapy Society, a member of the American Group Psychotherapy Association, and a Renee Trudeau & Associates-Trained Personal Renewal Group Facilitator. I am an advisory board member and former board of directors’ member for Wonders and Worries, a local nonprofit serving families coping with chronic and life threatening illness.
I earned my Doctorate and Masters degrees in Counseling Psychology from Texas Tech University, and completed a Clinical Psychology internship at the University of Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. I received my undergraduate degree in Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin.
The following quote from Scott Peck, M.D., in A Road Less Traveled, reflects some of my thoughts about the power and necessity of the therapeutic endeavor:
To become whole means that as we open to the pain, we open to the loss. We break open and, as a consequence, we get bigger and include more of life. We include what would have been “lost” to us if our hearts and minds had closed against the pain. We include what would have been lost if we had not take the time to heal. As singer/songwriter Carly Simon tells us: “There’s more room in a broken heart.”
…..we must be totally dedicated to truth. That is to say that we must always hold truth, as best we can determine it, to be more important, more vital to our self-interest, than our comfort……Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.
….without healing, the human spirit begins to shrivel.
A Road Less Traveled, Scott Peck, M.D.