Hello, and welcome. I am a professional counselor licensed in Texas and California with years of experience working as a psychotherapist, life coach, and positive discipline parent educator. I am also a parent, a wife, and an artist.
The life path that brought me into this profession began in childhood. I felt so deeply both joy and pain, and I needed to learn how to encounter the world without being consumed by it. In my twenties I read an enormously popular book, The Road Less Traveled; it had a profound impact on me. The first sentence is, “Life is difficult.” I recognized this truth in my own life, and I worked in my own therapy to heal, grow, and develop the discipline and perseverance — the practice — to be completely present to my life.
Life is difficult. The struggles I have experienced in life contribute to my ability to empathize. Several decades later another writer, Glennon Doyle, described life as brutal and beautiful; she combined them into a new word, brutiful. Life is definitely that. She is also known for saying, “We can do hard things.” When I find life challenging, I repeat that to myself like a mantra.
My journey to becoming a therapist could be described as a crooked mountain path — which is basically a way of describing life for all humans. There is a Zen koan that asks,
“How do we go straight ahead
On a narrow mountain path which
Has ninety-three curves?”
I won’t answer this, because the answer is what you find in yourself as you work in therapy. I will say sometimes one just needs to sit down, rest, and allow the cloudy water to settle. Having a skilled companion who is completely present with you, who can give perspective and bear witness to your struggle — that is what a therapist is.
I love doing this work, and I love my clients.