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 work as a psychotherapist.
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 fourteen 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 central part of my maturation as a psychotherapist. In my early thirties, I worked with an elder female Jungian analyst who confronted me with the psychological need of consciously facing the questions of my fertile years. I was struck by how my earlier therapy work, both personal and professional, generally 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 individual human vocal expression, in spoken language, to and with another human being. Accordingly, in sessions I offer careful listening and engaged conversation. I begin where each woman is ready to begin, trusting that a unique and fruitful dialogue will form and collaborating with the woman to shape it. The first step is always her sense of confidence in our ability to help her.
Broadly I identify myself as a “depth psychologist,” meaning that I pay attention to those aspects of experience that are not always present at the “surface” of awareness. I find this approach useful because I notice that many people enter therapy, particularly when it is their first time, not quite able to name what the problem is. Finding the words to express it—the kind of words that deeply satisfy and transform us—requires that we be open to what we can’t yet say. While a client and I might spend some of our time rationally working through her struggles and goals, we additionally might explore her night dreams; daydreams; intuitions; fragmented or unformulated memories, emotions, sensations, and thoughts; modes of creative expression; and archetypal resonances that connect her to larger human themes. We might consider distressing symptoms and behaviors as invitations for her into self-inquiry and reorganization. We also might explore her cultural, ancestral, and spiritual inheritances. As we expand the range and enrich the texture of her awareness, greater wellbeing and fuller maturity often follow.
The depths of experience include—and perhaps are most alive within—daily domestic and bodily life. As such, I also often work with clients on routines involving female body literacy, nourishment, physical activity, rest, and undistracted time with self and others. In our alienated, disembodied era, there is much to be said for getting back to such basics—practices which for many women now have become revelatory and life-changing.
I have received feedback from clients that my approach combines a warm presence of sisterhood with a strong rootedness in 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 my office 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 honor 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 ancestors. 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.
