Individual treatment for adults, adolescents, and young children
I am on the provider panels for the following insurance plans: Health Choice, Medicaid, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Blue Cross/Blue Shield PPO, United Behavioral Health, United Health Care, Cigna, Medcost
- Adults - The focus of individual counseling with adults is to identify what is not working well and what to do about it. Solutions to life problems may include; expressing feelings, re-examining decisions, identifying ineffective patterns of communication, and expanding options for problem solving.
- Adolescents - The focus of counseling with adolescents is to assist teens in developing a positive identity and prepare them for emancipation. This work usually includes improving communication skills, refusal skills, anger management, problem solving skills, and examining choices they are making in regard to their family and peer relationships.
- Parent coaching – Work with adolescents and young children always includes parent coaching. I believe that as long as children are living at home, they and their parents are a package deal. I work with parents to identify behavior management strategies for their children that are effective in teaching children to take responsibility for their behavior and are kind and respectful. I believe that parents are their children’s most important teachers and my job is to support them in being loving and effective parents.
Couple Counseling
Maintaining the sense of love and romance in our primary relationship is one of the most challenging tasks that we face in life. We are so barraged with the mundane demands of life that it is easy to lose our sense of connection with our partner. It is easy for tension, conflict, and power struggles to take over resulting in avoiding one’s partner rather than working together to support each other. Ultimately, this can result in two people living parallel lives under the same roof, having little communication beyond what is necessary to maintain the household. The goal of couple counseling is to restore connection and communication so that we experience the sense of joy and romance that drew us to our partner to begin with.
Substance Abuse/Addiction Counseling
Addiction is a heartbreaking and debilitating disease which left untreated will eventually isolate individuals from loving relationships and take away the ability to live productively. This disease is not curable but it is treatable. Many people have successfully learned to control this disease, live productively, and experience the love and support of their friends and family. I believe that addiction is a bio-psycho-social disease and that recovery requires attending to all aspects of one’s life including one’s physical health, coping skills, support system, and spiritual belief system. I believe that all addictions result in emotional isolation and that it is extremely difficult to recover without the support of a community. I encourage participation in support groups such as 12 Step Programs, Faith Based support programs, and programs such Women for Sobriety Rational Recovery.
Grief Counseling
Everyone experiences loss and disappointments in the course of life. Sometimes these are major losses like the loss of important relationships or the loss of jobs, sometimes the loss of hopes and dreams and future plans, sometimes the disappointment of not get something that we want. I don’t believe our culture does a good job of supporting people through loss. We have lost many of the rituals that have supported grieving both major losses and minor disappointments. When we don’t grieve our losses and disappointments, the unfinished feelings prevent us from connecting in new relationships and fully experiencing the opportunities for joy that are placed in front of us every day. Grief counseling allows the opportunity to resolve unfinished feelings regarding the loss and acknowledge the importance of the loss. Resolving grief creates the ability to take the love and goodness we have experienced with us as we continue our lives. Fully resolving grief creates the opportunity to be open to new relationships and experiences with joy and creativity.
Parenting with Love and Logic
I am a certified trainer for Parenting with Love and Logic, a parenting model developed by Foster Cline MD and Jim Fay. The goal of Parenting with Love and Logic is to help our children learn to be respectful, responsible, and fun to be around. They learn how to do this by learning from their own experience and from watching the adults around them model how to be respectful, responsible, and fun to be around. Parenting with Love and Logic offers practical strategies in parenting so that our children have opportunities to own their problems, think through their own solutions, and learn the relationship between their own choices and the consequences of their behavior. Parenting with love and logic also gives parents the tools to put the fun back into parenting so that we can enjoy our children and enjoy watching their journey to adulthood.
