Who Care-O-Van Serves

• Children

• Adolescents

• Adults

• Caregivers & Families

• Foster Care Providers

• School/Care Setting Staff

• Professional Service Providers

• Chronic stress and trauma

• Intergenerational and early childhood trauma

• Emotional/behavioral difficulties

• Postpartum and parenting struggles

• Sexual abuse and neglect

• Autism and Neurodivergence

• LGBTQ-IA2S+, gender and sexual identity diversity

• Relational harm and domestic violence

• Grief, loss and mourning

• Addictions

• Conflict, transitions and change

• Developmental delays and interference

Psychotherapy
& Education

As an attachment-focused, trauma sensitive, developmentally informed, and Internal Family Systems (IFS) trained mental health therapist (LMSW, Clinical), I offer individual therapeutic services for children (birth through age 10), adolescents (10-18), and adults, who are experiencing emotional, behavioral, developmental, sensory, social and/or relational struggles. 

In individual therapy, you lead and I guide. All parts of you, your identity, and your experiences are invited and welcome. We will work together to explore current and past experiences impacting your present, to identify and unearth insights, enhance your understanding of your Self and others, increase your capacity to respond rather than react, be present, and create new paths of awareness, growth, connection, healing, hope and resilience. 

As we all experience this world within and through the body, embodied experiences often lack verbal language, especially within early childhood. As we all develop our capacity for language as we age, we are limited to making meaning of our early childhood experiences without the resource of words and being in relationship with one who can bear witness to and help hold all of the parts of our Selves that need to be heard, nurtured, and held.

In working together, my goal is to help offer access to various modes of expression for children, adolescents, and adults, by facilitating interactions within nature, with animals, through play, art, music, cooking and movement, in order to offer different forms of language, resources, and being in relationship with our Selves, to express your experiences and needs, while being in relationship with each other and the world around us.

In collaborating together, my goal is to increase your capacity to listen to all of the parts within you that make you uniquely you, and gain understanding for why each and every one of those parts makes complete and perfect sense. I am here to support building self awareness, understanding of, and connection with your Self, and to help make sense of experiences, burdened beliefs, and ways of being that may keep impacting you in ways that are confusing, hurtful, overwhelming, and disorganized, that also may be isolating you, feel destructive, or like they are holding you back from accessing the sense of joy, rest, wonderment, and peace you deserve.

My aim is to make therapy not feel like the work of therapy. Rather I hope to create a relational experience that can feel fun, creative, open, accepting, connected, safe, and yes, celebratory in all ways reparative, health-full and love-full.

Parenting

I am here to offer parenting support therapeutic services for parents/care-givers individually, as well as joint sessions that include both the parent(s)/care-giver(s), and their child. 

Be it prenatal, postpartum or the raising of a child(ren) from birth through adolescence to adulthood, to be a parent/care-giver invites experiences of vulnerability, struggle, courage, guilt, fear, glory, persistence, shame, humility, grief and loss, growth, frustration, transcendence and love. In short, the process of becoming a parent and to be a parent is to experience ALL the feels. And more often than not, parenting resurfaces the parent’s/caregiver’s own experiences of childhood and being parented themselves.

I am committed to support parents, foster parents and care-givers within the parenting journey by helping build understanding of their child’s emotional world, developmental experience and capacity, as well as their child’s innate desire to feel relationally secure.

I am driven to support parents, foster parents and care-givers in learning how to remain present, patient, and self-regulate during those tough and overwhelming times of parenting, respond in ways that are informed, predictable, consistent, and maintain developmentally appropriate expectations and boundaries in order to support their child’s ability to successfully manage emotions.

I am called to support parents, foster parents and care-givers in reflecting upon their own experiences of being parented as a child, in order to identify and address unresolved childhood experiences and ways of being, impacting their own experience of parenting. This may be the most humbling invitation of parenting; the invitation to reflect upon our own experiences, thoughts, feelings, sensations, and actions, and to lean in to taking accountability for all the ways in which we impact others, especially our little humans.

Children invite us towards our own healing if we are courageous and earnest enough to listen; to learn how to parent our Selves and our children differently, in order to show up in all the ways we want to for our children and ultimately needed ourselves when very young. I believe this is the most challenging, AND ultimate gift of raising and working with children, the moving towards learning how to show up for our Selves, our children, others, and the world around us with warmth, gentleness, connectivity, and love.