Therapy with me is a tailored, collaborative process built around you: your history, your nervous system, your strengths, and what you actually need to move forward. I draw from a wide range of evidence-based approaches and adapt them to the person in session with me rather than fitting every client into the same model.

What remains consistent across all clients is the orientation: trauma-informed, evidence-informed, and neurosomatic. That means I approach therapy through the lens of current research and psychotherapy trends, and I pay close attention to the connections among your brain, body, emotions, beliefs, relationships, and survival responses.

Trauma Therapy

Trauma is at the center of most of what I do. Whether the trauma is a single defining event, a prolonged period of difficulty, childhood experiences, moral injury, or the accumulated weight of living in circumstances that were never safe or fair, I am trained and experienced in working with all of it.

I use several evidence-based trauma treatment approaches depending on what fits each client:

Brainspotting is a brain-body approach to processing trauma, shame, guilt, anxiety, and emotional overwhelm. It works beneath the level of conversation to help access and process deeper stuck points, which are often the places where trauma lives in the body and nervous system rather than in conscious memory. You do not have to describe every detail of what happened. Brainspotting tends to be especially useful for people who feel stuck despite years of insight or talk therapy.

EMDR — Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing — is a structured, research-supported approach to processing traumatic memories, distressing experiences, and the negative beliefs those experiences leave behind. Sometimes people know logically that something is over, but their body and emotions still react as if the threat is happening now. EMDR helps the brain and nervous system finish processing what got stuck. It is particularly effective for PTSD, moral injury, shame, guilt, and painful beliefs like it was my fault or I am not safe.

Cognitive Processing Therapy is a structured, evidence-based approach to working through the beliefs trauma leaves behind. After difficult experiences, people often carry painful conclusions about themselves, others, or the world. CPT gives you a clear, grounded way to examine where those beliefs came from, whether they are accurate, and how to begin relating to yourself with more fairness and less pain.

Clinical Hypnosis is a focused state of relaxed attention that can be used to access deeper layers of experience, reduce the emotional charge of difficult memories, build internal resources, and support nervous system regulation. It is not what you see in entertainment; instead, actual clinical hypnosis—taught, approved, and certified by the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis (ASCH)—is a collaborative, evidence-informed clinical tool used to complement other trauma treatment approaches.

Trauma-Focused CBT integrates cognitive behavioral techniques with trauma-sensitive approaches, particularly useful for processing trauma-related thoughts, beliefs, and behavioral patterns.

Nervous System and Body-Informed Work

Many people come to therapy because they understand what happened to them, but they still feel stuck in how it feels. That gap, between knowing and feeling, is often a nervous system problem, not a thinking problem.

Polyvagal-informed therapy starts with a simple but often relieving idea: the reactions you may have blamed yourself for are not character flaws. Shutting down, going numb, becoming anxious or defensive, people-pleasing, avoiding conflict, feeling constantly on edge. These behaviors, sensations, and feelings are your nervous system doing exactly what it learned—and what is supposed to do—to keep you safe. It’s just doing it at certain times and in certain ways that are very likely maladaptive to your environment (put differently, it’s incredibly uncomfortable and generally unhelpful).

In practice, this work involves learning to recognize the difference between states of safety, activation, and shutdown, understanding what moves you between them, and gradually building more choice in how you respond.

Substance Use and Addiction

I hold dual licensure in clinical mental health counseling and substance abuse counseling, and I bring more than two decades of direct experience working with people navigating addiction and recovery. I am trained in the ASAM criteria, the Matrix Model, Seeking Safety, SMART Recovery, and Motivational Interviewing, among other treatment modalities.

I approach substance use as a clinician who understands both the neurobiological underpinnings of addiction and the trauma, shame, and survival patterns that almost always accompany it. I do not work from a shame-based model. I work from an evidence-based, trauma-informed model that respects where you are and what you are ready to do.

Anxiety, Shame, and Emotional Regulation

Anxiety is rarely just anxiety. Shame is rarely just shame. These experiences are often survival responses. Patterns the nervous system and mind developed to protect you from threat, rejection, failure, or pain. Understanding what drives them is the first step toward changing them.

I draw on DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy) for emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness. I draw on CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) to identify and shift patterns of thought and behavior. However, the foundation of what I do is rooted in neurosomatic approaches and psychotherapy; that is, understanding the neuro-, bio-, and psychological underpinnings of the problems you bring to therapy, helping you understand them, and correcting them. Lastly, I incorporate psychodynamic approaches when understanding the deeper roots of current patterns, including early relational experiences, is part of the work.

Clinical Evaluations and Assessments

In addition to psychotherapy, I provide clinical evaluations and assessments across a range of legal, correctional, regulatory, and occupational contexts, including court-ordered and justice-involved evaluations, mental health and substance use assessments, employer and occupational referrals, Federal Aviation Administration Special Issuance evaluations, and Emotional Support Animal documentation. This is specialized work that most private practice therapists do not offer, and it reflects decades of direct experience at the intersection of clinical practice, the legal system, and regulatory frameworks. For complete information about the evaluation process, who I evaluate, fees, and scheduling, please visit the Clinical Evaluations and Assessments page.

Crisis Intervention

I am trained and certified in crisis intervention, suicide risk assessment, lethal means counseling, safety planning, and mobile crisis response. If you are experiencing acute instability or crisis, I can provide clinical support and safety planning as part of our ongoing treatment.

However, please note: If you are currently in crisis, please do not attempt to reach me. The more appropriate, safer thing to do is one of the following:

1. If your situation is life-threatening or emergent, call 911
2. Call your local crisis line
3. Call your local non-emergency line if you do not know your local crisis phone contact information
4. Call or text 988
5. Or go to your nearest emergency room

Cultural Competency and Multicultural Practice

I have worked with clients across a wide range of cultural, linguistic, and national backgrounds, including living and working in Mexico as a therapist; extensive work with first- and second-generation immigrant populations; Hispanic and Latino communities; and clients from rural Wisconsin who face significant barriers to care. My history has helped me to better understand the intersection of cultural identity, systemic mistrust, immigration stress, and trauma, and I work to provide care that is clinically sound and culturally responsive.

Clinical Supervision

I am a Wisconsin DSPS-approved LPC supervisor and licensed Independent Clinical Supervisor for substance abuse clinicians. I provide individual and group clinical supervision to provisionally licensed LPCs, SAC-ITs, and master's-level interns from CACREP-accredited programs.

If you are a provisionally licensed clinician seeking supervision or a fully licensed clinician seeking consultation, please visit the Clinical Supervision page or contact me directly.

My Overall Approach

The methods described here represent the approaches I use most often, but they do not capture everything. Each person brings a different history, a different nervous system, different strengths, and a different reason for seeking help. Because of that I tailor therapy to the person in front of me rather than fitting every client into the same model.

What stays consistent is the orientation. Therapy with me is trauma-informed, strengths-based, and body-informed. The goal is to help you feel less controlled by trauma, anxiety, guilt, shame, or overwhelm and be better equipped to move forward with clarity, steadiness, and self-trust.

Therapy with me is steady, collaborative, and focused on meaningful change at a pace that respects where you are.