Not the Right Therapist for Everyone. Perhaps the Right One for You.
Some therapists specialize in behavioral compliance. I specialize in honesty and authenticity — the kind that cuts through the story you've been telling yourself for years and asks what's actually underneath it.
I'm a Licensed Professional Counselor in Georgia with nearly two decades of clinical experience across therapeutic foster care, community mental health, school-based services, in-home services, and inpatient and outpatient psychiatric services. I built my career at the edges of the mental health system, working with people others had given up on, before burnout with that system's limitations drove me toward what I really wanted to do: depth work. The kind that takes time, requires courage, and actually changes something.
What I Actually Do in the Room
My clinical identity is relational psychodynamic at its core. That framing matters, because it shapes how I understand what brings you to therapy in the first place. Your symptoms are not deficits to be corrected. They are creative adaptations to painful circumstances — ways your mind and body found to survive when survival was the priority. The work is not about fixing you. It's about understanding you.
I believe the therapeutic relationship itself is the primary vehicle for healing. Being genuinely seen and understood is not just a precondition for change — it often is the change. Our sessions are warm and collaborative. I will not position myself as the expert on your experience. I am the expert on the process; you are the expert on your life.
Within that relational foundation, I draw from a broad clinical toolkit matched to the person in front of me.
Attachment theory shapes how I understand the wounds you carry and how I pace our work together. Schema therapy gives us language for the deep, recurring beliefs that quietly run your decisions without asking permission. CBT and DBT offer concrete skills when you need to manage thoughts, emotions, and hard moments — structured approaches that interrupt patterns when insight alone isn't enough. ACT and narrative therapy support the bigger questions: who you are, what you actually value, and what kind of life you want. Gestalt approaches enter when you need to do something with what you're feeling, not just name it.
For experiences that live below the level of words, I bring in somatic awareness and creative modalities — including expressive arts and therapeutic tabletop role-playing games. The TTRPG work is not a gimmick. For certain clients, it's the only door that opens: collaborative storytelling and character play that builds perspective-taking, emotional regulation, and narrative flexibility in ways that sitting across a desk simply cannot.
Existential therapy sits underneath much of what I do. Existential work takes seriously the things that don't resolve: uncertainty, loss, the reality that every choice carries a cost. These aren't problems to eliminate. They are the actual terrain of a human life, and learning to move through that terrain with intention is itself a form of healing.
I weave psychoeducation throughout everything, because I want you to become genuinely curious about your own patterns rather than mystified by them. You should be leaving sessions with a clearer map, not a longer list of things that are wrong with you.
Running beneath all of it is a feminist and liberation psychology framework. I am committed to understanding you in the context of the systems you inhabit. I will never pathologize your survival. I am building a space where people who have spent a lifetime feeling unseen finally, genuinely, are.
Who I Work With
My clinical work centers on:
Adults navigating relationship trauma, adoption-related concerns, coercive dynamics, and the aftermath of dysfunctional or abusive family systems
Neurodivergent clients — ADHD, autism, PNES, and the overlap between them — who have spent a lifetime masking, overperforming, and not being believed
People in the middle of identity development: gender identity, sexual identity, faith identity, and the grief that arrives when the self you were taught to be starts to crack
Clients carrying complex grief and burnout in bodies that have been through serious medical events
Adolescents and emerging adults navigating severe and persistent mental illness and developmental stressors without adequate scaffolding
I do not shy away from clinical complexity. Borderline presentations, dissociative patterns, treatment-resistant depression, chronic suicidality managed collaboratively over time — these show up in my work, and I stay.
What Makes Me Different
I am direct, but encouraging. I will name what I see. I will not sit in comfortable silence while you avoid the thing that matters. My directness is not blunt or clinical — it carries warmth, humor when the moment calls for it, and a quality of attention that I hope feels like being genuinely held.
I am explicit about the body in therapy. When emotional thawing shows up as unfamiliar physical sensation, I name it. When anxiety lives in your chest, I notice. When numbing has been doing protective work for twenty years, I respect it before I challenge it.
I adapt the frame to the person. For clients who need structure, I build it. For clients who need movement and experimentation, I move with them. I send journal prompts between sessions. I recommend books. When it serves the work, I'm willing to engage with a client's whole system.
My practice, Crafting Self Psychotherapy, is built around one clear idea: long-term, depth-oriented work for people who are tired of staying on the surface. I'm not the right therapist for everyone. For the clients I am right for, the difference is real.
I work with adults and adolescents via telehealth across Georgia, as well as in person at Sea Glass Therapy in Newnan, Georgia. I accept several major insurance panels and offer limited sliding scale availability. To inquire about working together, reach out through my contact page.