My Approach to Helping
It is important to find a counselor with whom you feel comfortable and whose skills and interests match your needs. As such, I want you to know more about me, my background, and my work so that you can make a well-informed decision about your mental health care. In my view, counseling is a type of new learning about yourself, your emotions, your core beliefs, and about your typical ways of behaving in your relationships with the people that are most important to you. So many of us find ourselves automatically repeating the same patterns of behavior over and over again, feeling confused about why we do so and uncertain about how to change them. I believe that our thoughts, feelings, core beliefs, ways of coping, and our typical patterns of engaging in relationships are shaped by our past and current life experiences. Participating in therapy will likely lead to important discoveries about how and why some of these core parts of yourself developed in the first place, why unwanted behaviors are repeated, and most importantly, it will involve the development of new, more effective thoughts, emotions, behaviors, ways of feeling about yourself, and of being in relationships with the important people in your life. My primary goal as a therapist is to provide a safe, comfortable, compassionate space where you can explore the aspects of your life that are not currently working and replace them with new, more effective and successful ones. My hope is that each person will discover new strengths and capabilities that have not yet been tapped into.
More Info About My Practice
I am a licensed psychologist in the state of Florida. I received my undergraduate degree from Central Michigan University, where I majored in Psychology and Family Studies and minored in Women's Studies. I then attended the University of Central Florida where I received my first Master's degree in Clinical Psychology. I received my second Master's degree and Doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology from the Georgia School of Professional Psychology in Atlanta, Georgia. I completed both my internship training and my postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Rochester in New York.