Services
About My Clients
I provide individual therapy that is grounded in social consciousness, LGBTGEQIAP+ affirming, and focused on your interests and concerns, as well as the interpersonal, cultural, and sociopolitical dynamics interacting with them. While I’m eager to work with adults of any age, I’m especially experienced with helping young adults navigate heavy existential questions, identity development, political distress, and career and academic exploration.
My Background and Approach
My approach centers the therapeutic relationship, prioritizing your self-expertise and personal strengths in conjunction with my theoretical approach. I am a humanist, who integrates relational-cultural, social & critical–psychoanalytic, existential, intersubjective & relational, postmodern, and systemic theories. Our process can involve developing insight from emotional experience, re-contextualizing suffering through political and socio-economic critique, interpreting thematic patterns for new ways of relating to self and others, constructing meaning to restore or enhance agency, and building relational empowerment for social change. My professional background includes licenses (licensed professional counselor [LPC]) in PA, VA, & TX; national certified counselor (NCC) through the NBCC; a PhD in Counseling from James Madison University, MS in Clinical Mental Health Counseling, and a master of liberal arts and bachelor of science in education from Lock Haven University.
My Personal Beliefs and Interests
My orientation as a humanistic counselor is entangled with my beliefs as a humanist person. I believe in the higher power of humanity and practice a faith in our struggle to move power towards goodness and dignity, despite forces that exploit that same potential power for cruelty. As a counselor, I strive to empower people towards their own aims of goodness (or wellbeing, growth, connection, etc.) through counseling and psychotherapy process. I believe the aspirations and work of social justice are necessary for humanistic counseling to really be "human" and for the virtues of humanism to matter in a meaningful way. Alongside insight development, emotional processing, and meaning-making, I believe that counseling and psychotherapy are most effective when people are empowered to know, grow, and mobilize their strengths and resources within themselves and within their relationships.