I started working in the field of trauma and traumatic stress while I was in graduate school for my Master’s, beginning in 2011. While living in Kentucky (my home state), I went from rape crisis counseling, to working with children in school settings, to therapeutic foster care, and back to rape crisis/intimate partner violence work with cisgender women, children, and LGBTQIA+ folks. In 2017, I left my old Kentucky home to relocate to the upper Ohio Valley, where I continued to focus my clinical work on traumatic experiences, co-occurring substance use disorders, women’s mental health concerns, and completed Basic Training (and later certification) in EMDR therapy.

I finished my PhD in Counselor Education & Supervision in December of 2018, and officially added “counselor educator” to my list of qualifications. I also had acquired a host of chronic health conditions to learn how to navigate, and learned about their link to traumatic stress. In the summer of 2021, I left clinical work “full-time” to be a counselor educator full-time, started working on becoming an Approved Consultant in EMDR therapy, and became a fully remote psychotherapist.

Then, I became a mama, and my whole world turned upside down. After my own traumatic birthing experience, I started to realize that I was struggling with hyperarousal, shame, and severe anxiety because of this event. At the time, I had been specializing in trauma & traumatic stress for nearly 10 years, but it took my own lived experience to realize just how different a traumatic birth can be. What’s more, I noticed that my baby was what some folks have termed “high needs,” and I wondered how much of this was due to her memories of her birth, being unable to engage in skin-to-skin care until hours after birth, and her little body holding onto all that traumatic stress.

In 2022, I began to focus my career, continuing education, and research on perinatal mental health, traumatic birthing experiences, attachment work, developmental trauma, mental health issues related to lactation, and using EMDR therapy with infants and young children. Currently, I am the only clinician certified in EMDR therapy, perinatal mental health, and lactation counseling licensed in my states of practice (and quite possibly the US!), meaning there’s no one else trained or certified quite like me!

Owner, Counselor (she/they)

Welcome! I’m so glad you’re here.

My Background: