Foundation
I hold a B.A. in English literature and psychology as well as an M.A. and Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As is true of many people who pursue psychotherapy training, I felt a need to study questions of human motivation, behavior, and relationships in order to discern my path forward in life. My graduate program emphasized the value in learning about the philosophical foundations and sociohistorical contexts in which psychology and psychotherapy emerged. As students immersed in psychoanalysis, existential-phenomenology, and humanistic psychology, we spent a lot of time discussing the “why” behind theory, research, and practice, as well as the mysteries in how psychological healing occurs. I learned to think critically about the assumptions that the psyche-helping professions make about the human person. I carry forward this curious and questioning sensibility in my psychotherapy practice.
Over the years, I have trained and worked in various settings, including college counseling centers, a community clinic, and an inpatient unit, and I have served as an independently contracted psychologist with the Nooksack Indian Tribe. I also have taught undergraduate courses in psychology. I started my private practice in 2018 with the desire to form more autonomous and intentional professional relationships. I have been practicing psychotherapy for fifteen years in total.
In addition to my professional education and experience, my own personal experience with various therapists and kinds of therapy has served as a key part of my maturation as a psychotherapist. In my early thirties, I worked with an elder female Jungian analyst who confronted me with my need to consciously explore the central binary question in every woman’s life: “Will you or will you not bear a child?” I was struck by how my earlier therapy work, both personal and professional, often had overlooked the bodily considerations unique to women’s development. I changed my own life and deepened my commitment to serving women clients.
Growing up in Western Pennsylvania, I was blessed with grandparents who all lived into my adulthood, three out of four of whom were raised in immigrant households. Their stories of ethnicity, community, faith, sacrifice, and service during the Great Depression and WWII formed a repository of familial-historical memory that I feel lucky to carry with me. Though my life has included periods of wandering, I am rooted in their example. As I entered adolescence and young adulthood and began to explore human nature in earnest myself, I spent a lot of time training and performing as a classical singer and steeping in a love of opera. I have learned so much about the human heart through the vulnerability and power of singing. My Catholic religious inheritance—from Italian, Eastern-European, and Irish ancestors—offered me another foundational resource for exploration of the human person. In the Catholic Church I receive my sense of wonder and belonging, especially through the majesty of her Mass, the sweetness and diversity of her popular piety, and the dignity of her veneration of the Blessed Mother. This lifelong involvement with the ancestral, the artistic, and the devotional offers inspiration and particularity to my therapeutic presence, beyond my conventional training.
Approach
For me, psychotherapy fundamentally is about the power of human vocal expression, in spoken language, to and with another human being. It’s a professionalized version of one of our ancient human practices: speaking to another person in order to find truth, meaning, and right action. Psychotherapy’s special practice is that it constrains one of the conversational participants to focus all of her attention and responsiveness on the needs of the other person. I think that it is ultimately this simple formula that makes psychotherapy helpful.
My approach integrates diverse influences from throughout my training and career and takes individual shape based on the needs of each client. Broadly, I am a therapist who attunes to those aspects of experience that are not always present at the “surface” of awareness, and I help clients to consider how distressing symptoms and behaviors might actually be invitations into deeper self-inquiry and life reorganization. Accordingly, I encourage exploration of those areas of one’s psyche often neglected in our hectic and alienated age, including fragmented or unformulated memories, emotions, and sensations; dreams and daydreams; imagination, contemplation, and prayer; and cultural, ancestral, and religious inheritances. Unforeseen treasures and keys can emerge as we offer these areas our attention. To make such work concrete, I also often assist clients with creating tangible routines for daily life. These might involve physical nourishment, activity, and rest; female body literacy; expressions of creativity and devotion; and undistracted, intentional time with self and others. In all of this, I seek to honor the unique physiology that informs women’s physical, emotional, spiritual, and relational wellbeing.
I have received feedback from clients that my style combines warmth and solidarity with self-containment. I know that many women have experienced violations to their vulnerability, including those caused by others’ attempts (even well-meaning) to take charge and “heal” or “save.” I know that I am neither judge nor savior. I value clear boundaries so that in working with me a woman can hear and feel her own experience. I am candid when called for, but fundamentally committed to witnessing and companionship, rather than rescuing.
Ultimately, I respect the fact that psychotherapy is not a solution for every problem and that it cannot cure us of the reality of suffering in human life. But I also bring my own tried and tested confidence that psychotherapy can be very helpful for addressing suffering related to formative life events and experiences that we are struggling to digest—especially because many of us now lack the familial and communal structures that guided and sustained our foremothers. Psychotherapy can help us to claim our lives, complete unfinished business, and integrate and/or release the past—often with the liberating insight that we do not need other people to change for us to do any of that work. We reach beyond limiting stories or patterns, grow our capacity to address any ongoing challenges, celebrate gifts we have neglected or disowned, and find a more comfortable home in life and among other human beings. Then we can get on with the hard and beautiful work of loving and suffering well—work from which therapy cannot, and does not need to, deliver us.
