Important Forms:
-New Client Intake Form
-Collaborative Marriage & Family Counseling Consent Form
-Electronic Payment Authorization Form
-Notice of Privacy Practices

Clients:  Please complete these forms and fax them prior to your first session or bring it with you completed.  Fax to 314-827-0074.

Biography / Education / Credentials

I am a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (L.C.S.W.) and I have worked as a clinician for over 10 years.  Before beginning my career in mental health, I worked as a Human Resources professional at a local university and a health care setting.

My passion is to help people improve their relationships!  I have found that there is often a correlation with how people feel about themselves and how they feel about their relationships with others.  As I work with my clients to improve one aspect, the other is also improved, and this is exciting to witness. 

Another passion is learning.  I enjoy sharing what I know with my clients to aid their self understanding.  My love of learning and my sincere desire to serve my clients well propels me to continually seek training and learn new models, theories, and tools to use in my work. 

I’d like to briefly share with you how my practice and professional interests have evolved over time.

My initial career goal was to help individuals and families recover from addiction and codependency.  After becoming more calm and stable, these clients desired to feel more skillful and connected in their intimate relationships with spouses, partners, children, extended family, and others.  So together we focused on developing skills to improve intimacy, prevent unnecessary conflict, and manage conflict appropriately.  This was helpful, but not sufficient.  Why not?

As humans, we have amazing cognitive abilities to learn and re-learn, and that’s what my clients did (and do)!  Yet, for many, there remained a struggle to implement these learned skills when their physiology and emotions got the better of them.  Often this looked like they were "hijacked” by intense feelings (often fear, anger, and grief) or became seemingly “stuck” in stories of past hurts. 

It seems that these “hijacked” emotions that my clients report are often the result of unresolved relationship wounds from current and/or past relationships.   And luckily, there are several ways that these issues can be helped!  Interventions based on theories of love, attachment, and trauma, are often helpful at this point in therapy. 

Using these approaches, I help my clients learn how to work with the triggered feeling and come to understand the “meaning” of the feeling---what it means about themselves and their loved one, and the purpose of the feeling (which is often to signal an increased need for connection and/or to prevent the prospect of additional hurt).

When help is brought to these issues, it makes “learned” responses and skills more accessible and more effective.  Clients report finally feeling calm, centered, connected, and confident in a way they have never experienced before!

My current clinical interest centers around learning more about Internal Family Systems (Richard Schwartz), Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy (Sue Johnson), Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (Pat Ogden), Accelerated Experiential-Dynamic Psychotherapy (Diana Fosha), trauma resolution, attachment theory, mindfulness, and the relationship between the brain and behavior .

Thank you for taking time to learn more about my work!

To learn more about the profession of social work and the L.C.S.W. credential, please go to: http://www.helpstartshere.org/home.html.  To learn more about my professional work history, feel free to review my Curriculum Vitae.

·         Member of the National Association of Social Workers, Missouri Society for Clinical Social Work, Psychotherapy St. Louis, and an Affiliate Member of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy

·         Completed Level Two training in Internal Family Systems Therapy

·         Recognized facilitator of the Love & Logic approach to parenting

·         Certified Instructor - Beyond Consequences

·         Trained in the administration and interpretation of the PREPARE/ENRICH relationship assessments for couples

A member of the National Registry of Marriage Friendly Therapists, an Advanced Practitioner Network