The education behind the work

My deepest training is in the injuries that happen early and relationally: complex and developmental trauma, early childhood trauma and neglect, attachment disruption, emotional neglect, and the long shadow they cast - shame, abandonment, the ache of belonging, dissociation and the protective responses that once made perfect sense. This is the ground everything else stands on, and it is why I can sit with a grown adult and recognize the child who had to adapt.

Alongside that study I trained in EMDR and in Internal Family Systems-informed parts work, which changed the way I listen. I have also studied interpersonal neurobiology and nervous-system regulation and co-regulation - the science of how one nervous system helps settle another - and trained in experiential and nonverbal approaches: sandtray, narrative therapies, and the study of somatic practice. So much of what the body holds does not come out in words.

My understanding of the developing brain has been shaped most by Dan Siegel and Bruce Perry - their work on attachment, brain development, and relational neuroscience. Their teaching is a large part of why I believe what I believe: behavior makes sense in context, adaptations were intelligent, and people are often farther along than they realize. That is not a technique I learned in a weekend. It is the result of years of study and of watching it prove true, over and over, in real lives.

Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy is where medicine and legality meet today. Ketamine is legal - prescribed and held within a licensed medical framework - and it is the one medicine-based offering I can provide directly, as a ketamine-assisted psychotherapy provider through Journey Clinical. For someone who wants medicine work without leaving California, this is the door that is open right now.

My other altered-state training has taken two forms. The first was a six-month individual apprenticeship in psychedelic facilitation - structured, experiential training in preparation, set and setting, intention development, therapeutic interventions during medicine sessions, and integration, including observation, assisting, and supervised facilitation. The second was MDMA-assisted couples work with Jonathan Robinson, with ongoing consultation in that specialty.

The environment matters as much as the medicine. I have studied therapeutic music through Third Tone and Mendel Kaelen, and I love the book The Psychedelic DJ. My view is that music is medicine in its own right - in an altered state, it can even lead the way. I am continually learning, and continually adding to my playlists.

And then there are the plants. What began as an experiential cohort became something closer to a semester-long deep dive in herbalism, and it went far beyond journey support: wellness, plant wisdom, culture, history, folk wisdom. It was delightful - life changing, actually. Some plants help calm a nervous system. Some help clarify thoughts, or clarify your voice so you can speak more clearly. These are experiential therapies in their own right, and learning them changed how I understand what support can be.

And because this work asks for humility, the ethics never stop: continuing study of psychedelic ethics, boundaries, consent, harm reduction, the sensory environment, and responsible facilitation, informed by Kylea Taylor's work. My practice is supported by ongoing peer consultation and PGN Wisdom Circles. I also host a monthly experiential case-consultation group through the Expansion Community. These are peer consults, not teaching - I hold the space, encourage, and offer my views from my own experience.

I am learning all of this to support people who travel for psychedelic work in places where it is legal - and for the hope that, one day, plant medicine will be decriminalized for mental health care here in California.

Curious about ketamine-assisted therapy? →

My continuing education has followed the losses people carry quietly: complicated and prolonged grief, ambiguous loss, and the losses no one hands you a sympathy card for - adoption and reproductive loss, infertility, estrangement, caregiving. The list sounds heavy. The work isn't, mostly. It's listening for what was never allowed to be mourned.

And some of the losses aren't deaths at all. They're identities - women's sexuality, body image and Health at Every Size-informed care, midlife, and the long crossing of perimenopause and menopause.

Perimenopause deserves more than a mention, because I know this stage from the inside. Our culture treats it as something to endure - a bundle of symptoms to push through on the way to being old. For me it became something else entirely. Psychedelic work helped me meet this crossing with curiosity instead of dread, and it changed my relationship to my own body and my own aging in ways I'm still grateful for. That healing is why I now sit with women in this same crossing. Not to hand anyone my map - everyone's terrain is their own - but because I know what it is to walk in dreading it, and what it can be to walk out feeling like myself again.

Woven through all of it is study of ceremonial and experiential approaches to grief and transition, because some losses need a container, not a conversation.

Adoption competency is one of the deepest wells I draw from. I came to this work as an adoptive mother before I ever came to it as a therapist - the lived experience led me to the training, and the training gave me language for what I was living. I completed the Training for Adoption Competency - including Train-the-Trainer preparation - and Trust-Based Relational Intervention caregiver training, with continuing education through C.A.S.E., the Alliance, Show Hope, and other adoption-focused organizations. Behind the acronyms is the subject itself: what it does to a person to begin life with a break in the bond, and what helps. Grief and loss, belonging, identity, the family relationships adoption threads through.

I have taught these subjects to professionals and families, and I provide specialty consultation to clinicians working with adoption-related concerns. Hard beginnings are not a specialty topic for me. They are one of the places I know the terrain best - which is why the lights metaphor came from there first.

Emotionally Focused Therapy is the spine of my couples work, with additional training through the Couples Institute and ongoing couples consultation. I also trained in MDMA-assisted couples work, which sits at the intersection of everything above - attachment, safety, and the willingness to risk connection again.

Underneath that training sits years of wider study - infidelity and repair, sexuality and intimacy, blended families, the ways many men were taught to lose track of what they feel. Each of these is a place where a couple can lose each other, and a place where they can find their way back. In couples work, my deepest conviction is gentle but firm: you and your partner are on the same side - the cycle is what you're facing together.

My path began in liberal studies and teacher preparation before a Master of Science in Counseling, with clinical placements chosen to deepen my work with children and families. Along the way: the Nurtured Heart Approach, Trust-Based Relational Intervention, and years of study in child development, trauma-informed parenting, parent-child repair, and the realities of foster, adoptive, and kinship families. I have developed and delivered parent education and professional training for much of my career. What runs underneath all of it is a simple belief: a child's behavior makes sense, and the relationship is the way in.

A thread of its own runs through this: gifted and twice-exceptional people. That thread is also lived - I parent a twice-exceptional child, and that journey led me to train with James T. Webb and to develop professional education informed by the SENG model. The heart of that study is the social and emotional world of gifted kids - overexcitabilities and intensity, asynchronous development, perfectionism, and what it takes to parent them without dimming them.

I bring familiarity with Christian theology, biblical language, and church culture; earlier in my career I created and taught a mental-health education series within a church community. My personal relationship with religion has changed over the years, and I do not practice from a particular religious affiliation. What has not changed is my respect for the framework a person brings. I can work comfortably within a client's Christian or spiritual tradition without imposing my own beliefs on it.

My professional study here includes religious trauma, spiritual abuse, and cult and high-control group dynamics. I'm particularly focused on the innate drive for belonging that we usually need to untangle. Alongside that, my study includes mindfulness, ritual and meaning-making, somatic practices, and nature-based approaches. I am currently completing training in meditation teaching and spiritual psychology.

I love the coaching side of my therapy practice. I am a certified Optimize Coach - a certification that braids together positive psychology, practical philosophy, behavior change, purpose, energy, and relationship - and it suits me. I love creatively and intentionally finding ways to apply insight into daily practices and slow, steady mindset shifts. Insight is lovely. Practice is where the lights come on.

The studying has not stopped. Peer consultation, wisdom circles, case consultation, continued reading and continued training - because I freaking love this stuff. The learning is the point: new ideas, deeper layers, and the quiet satisfaction of distilling it all into something a person can actually use in daily intentional life.