Education & Experience

I have worked with pre-teens, teenagers, adults, and their families with mental health and parenting struggles for the past decade. I started out my mental health career during my undergraduate program at The University of Oregon, focusing on early intervention for children who have experienced trauma and their parents. My path then progressed into the education and support of mental health awareness for adolescents. While getting my Masters in Social Work at San Diego State University I worked with children with developmental disabilities and also worked at the inpatient psychiatric hospital level of care, specifically the child and adolescent unit. My career as a therapist began at an adolescent mental health residential treatment center where after a few years I went on to become the Program Director. At the residential, I oversaw the clinical team and also provided clinical services (individual therapy, family therapy, and group therapy) of working with teens with acute mental health struggles (including self-harm, suicidal ideation, homicidal ideation, psychosis, trauma, mood disorders, behavioral challenges, personality disorder traits, substance misuse, and disordered eating) alongside their families. During my almost decade long tenure, I oversaw multiple mental health residential treatment centers along with multiple outpatient (PHP and IOP) programs. I have been trained in EMDR since 2020 and in the process of EMDR certification. As meaningful and impactful as my work was within residential, I noticed the astonishing lack of availability of therapists, especially for adolescents and their families, that were readily able to continue the vital, important and valuable work that we were unearthing and building the fundamentals upon in residential. This is what inspired me to continue to do the work that I love to do, but now in an outpatient therapy setting.