ABOUT ME

Most of my experience, training, and pursuits have been centered around Narrative Therapy practice.  Narrative Therapy works with the challenging of the problem stories view of life and worth by re-storying people’s lives through their experience, values and their intentions for their life that are often obscured by the problem view.

My internships and doctoral residencies were in Family and Narrative Therapy with amazing live supervision and training.

The clinical experience I have had over these last 20+ years has been vast and ever changing.  I have worked with children, families, and adults with a myriad of concerns and/or problem stories from a Narrative Therapy perspective, helping families and people take their lives back from problems. I believe that there is a rich story in all of us that speaks more truth and volumes more to who you are and are becoming than any problem can. Narrative Therapy can help bring this more forward by our engagement in preferred meaning making and poetic living.

In addition to therapy work. I have also taught in the areas of Narrative Therapy, Family Systems, Gender Affirming Care, and Feedback Informed Treatment. Teaching has been a wonderful experience for me as I enjoy engaging my colleagues in thinking differently about our work, from a non-pathological way of thinking about others as well as bringing cultural meaning making in the therapy room. Our lives are more than individual encapsulated lives but ones that interact with others and other cultural ideas/expectations for living “well”.

I also have the privilege of training/teaching/supervising therapist. This has been a rewarding experience helping train therapist in a way that is consistent with what the field’s outcome data about what works in therapy. These common therapeutic factors are unsurprisingly at odds with how the field decides to train therapists. Through supervision we can focus much more developing on what the client wants rather than how the therapist believes the client needs.

Lastly, I am a certified trainer through the International Center for Clinical Excellence (ICCE) headed by renowned psychologist Scott Miller and colleagues. The ICCE is an institute that works to bring the most current research into practice to help improve the results of the field and therapist themselves through a process called Feedback Informed Treatment (FIT). The outcome data shows that what is most important for change to occur in therapy is 1. Who the client is 2. Who the therapist is 3.The fit between them. Positive outcomes are achieved by placing the client at the center of the therapy (not the therapist’s agenda, or ideas, or theories) through asking and responding to ongoing feedback about the work. I believe that this “asking” makes the therapist more accountable to the client than any therapeutic idea. I am available to individual therapist and organizations for teaching and training in FIT.