Counselors

Though my Father was Jewish and my mother Mormon, In my early 20’s I spent 6 years living as a monastic and have lived in both Christian and Buddhist monasteries. I also went to seminary and have lived within several closed religious communities. I have been fortunate to have traveled and lived in other countries, and to have had the opportunity to study cross cultural psychology experientially. My primary reason for traveling in other countries has been to study with various teachers on the nature of consciousness and to learn by experiencing other paradigms. I have been studying indigenous medicine and psychology with Indigenous Elders in the Amazon jungle of Columbia since 1999. I have also traveled through India, Europe, Canada, Latin America, Australia, Mexico, Turkey, and Asia studying the psychological teachings contained in the religious teachings, histories, sacred sites and art of these cultures. I am interested in how psychology has manifested over the centuries and have published an academic paper called “The True Origins of Psychology and the Influence of Euro-American Ethnocentrism“.

I currently live and work in Saigon, Vietnam and Bangkok, Thailand.

I have worked in mental health and western psychology for nearly 30 years. I received my Bachelor of Arts degree in Interdisciplinary Studies from Marylhurst University in Oregon; and my Masters in Counseling Psychology with an emphasis in Jungian Depth Psychotherapy and Psycho-dynamic Process from Pacifica Graduate Institute in California. I also have a strong background of training in mindfulness based therapies such as Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (really great for helping one learn how to manage emotions); Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (really great for working with serious depression and hopelessness); Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (generally great for treating depression , anxiety, panic and self hatred); and Gestalt Therapy (I trained extensively in this method for over 3 years in treating severe trauma and childhood wounds). However I now consider myself a somatic therapist as I have learned from many years of experience that trauma cannot be resolved through thinking and talking. I feel very strongly about helping people with religious trauma as I have experienced first hand over the years how powerful religious trauma can be as well as the fear that it can trap people within.  Because I have lived within closed religious circles, I understand how alone one can feel with religious trauma in our past. Religion can provide a lot of certainty in ones life and if you take away or lose your religion you can be left within a vacuum of uncertainty. This can be quite terrifying. I believe that I can help guide you out of this fear, anxiety and uncertainty to discover your own truth and help support you in learning how to trust again that your emotions are not something sinful. I now have many years of guiding people out of that pain into finding thier own unique truth beyond fear.

I am a psychotherapist, educator and teacher working for people who seek inner peace, resolution of historic internal conflicts and a grounded, meaningful experience of life. My original training is psychodynamic with a deep understanding of Jungian depth psychology. I am a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, and over the last 40 years I have directed/administrated and provided various healthcare services and treatment programs for adults, adolescents and families in acute care hospitals, residential treatment, partial hospitalization and structured outpatient programs as well as private practice. I have facilitated seminars and retreats focused on substance dependence and addiction recovery, family and generational codependency recovery and various areas of personal growth.

I offer counseling services in a private practice setting and have done so for over 30 years.  My services include individual and couples counseling, as well as group experiences. Over the years I have helped numerous people who suffer with varying levels of internal pain and conflict.

My primary focus of interest is in treatment for those suffering from toxic religious, cult and group experiences. Such work inherently requires the creation of a safe, stable environment within ones self.  We work together to help you find your own understanding of trust, confidence, self-acceptance and respect for your own perceptions, ideas and beliefs.  Having spent upwards of 15 years involved in closed spiritual communities, I am well versed in the internal wounding that is an intrinsic aspect of the experience.

Over the past 25 years I have studied the psychological teachings within the worlds ancient religions as well as taught classical forms of eastern and western forms of meditation. I use a more science based model of mindfulness and meditation when working with clients. I have come to know that counseling and psychotherapy treatment is most effective when cutting edge therapeutic approaches are combined with science based mindfulness practices. Practicing combining these two elements brings the experience of one’s internal competency and courage.  The courage to heal grows within and as a result, permanent change and growth become reality.

I grew up in country Australia in a family where I suffered childhood trauma. From my early twenties into my early thirties, I was immersed in a quasi-cult run by my father, that was a mixture of New Age, Eastern and Christian practices. In my early thirties I severed all ties with my father and this group and began my journey of healing. In the process I have overcome my addiction issues and started the process of healing my own childhood and religious trauma.

I am now at point where I feel my experience, recovery and understanding of how I have moved forward could be used to support and inspire others to find their own healing and begin to trust in their own “inner knowing”.

I am  about to complete my certification of being a “Trauma Recovery Coach” as well as ongoing training specializing in healing religious trauma. I am a practitioner of mindfulness and have experienced the immense benefits and insights that come from meditation and mindfulness practice. Supporting clients in developing a mindfulness practice is a key component  in fostering inner-safety, serenity and a greater sense of self-acceptance.

Prior to being  trained in trauma recovery coaching I have been a relationship coach,  specialized in relationship crisis. During that time, I have helped client  through  their pain and anguish of complicated break ups, difficult affairs, unrequited love, loneliness and longing and navigating the complex and ambiguous terrain of modern romantic involvements. One of my main reason I want to work more directly with  trauma, is because I have come to understand many of the adult relationship- problems that people encounter which have their origin in unresolved and unhealed childhood trauma. Healing these deeper wounds is a foundational process that allows us to build from the ground up more healthy and happy relationships. 

In addition to this I am a certified provider of SSP (Safe and Sound protocol) which  is a unique and cutting-edge audio intervention that helps calm the nervous system and help facilitate a great sense of safety and well-being.

I grew up Mennonite in a fundamentalist evangelical style church with an ever-questioning mind and a drive to make change in systems and communities in which people were suffering. My precocious and determined personality both benefited the church structure and threatened the status quo, and that tension played out for years. I first realized I was growing up in a toxic religious environment when I sought religious leadership in my teens. My home church denied women public leadership roles, supposedly on the basis of scripture. After asking my pastor if I could preach one Sunday and getting a heavy dose of theological gaslighting and character attacks in return, my sense of safety was shattered. I discovered how easy it was for someone to manipulate my perception of myself if they used religious language. I felt as if all human relationships were dangerous and God was a weapon they could use to hurt and control me.

I’m a home school mom to 2 incredible humans that inspire me daily to do my personal healing work. I was born & raised in Ontario, Canada but came to the USA at 18 and I’m still here, currently residing in the beautiful northeast Tennessee.

When I was about 5 years old, we became a strict independent Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) home. Homechurching was our norm, punctuated by monthly gatherings my mom helped organize for the disgruntled Adventists in our area. We “held the standard of truth” high – essentially clinging to the fundamental beliefs of the SDA Church, but decrying the apostacy that was “apparent” in the church – thus the absence from actually attending church. Some of my religious memories include strict adherence to a completely vegan diet (minus honey), dress reform (long, baggy skirts, loose clothing, no shorts for guys, swimming in skirts), morning and evening family worship with singing hymns and studying the Bible & the writings of our prophet Ellen G White, a focus on character development (Bill Gothard, anyone?) and perfection, overhearing dramatic conversations about impending end-time events, how we would or would not survive them, the ways we’d be tortured, the inevitability of having to choose between the ones we love and being faithful to God.

After several years of home churching and then visiting an SDA church made up mostly of the older population (and therefore “less apostate”) my family was introduced to the Seventh-Day Adventist Reform Movement – an entirely separate denomination from the SDA church. We joined the church and, always “holier” than the people even in this new church, I grew up with an intense sense of isolation and peculiarity; as well as a deep religious “fervor.” Car rides home from church often included discussions where we mourned the high heels, the slits in the skirts, the oil & refined flour used in their cooking, the fact that some of them watched movies and, *gasp* some of the girls even wore pants during the week. Terrible, terrible sins.

Consistent with my religious fervor I attended 2 years of Bible college (which included lots of door to door work called “colporteuring” or “canvassing”) & then taught and attended 2 years at a missionary school. A couple years after launching into ministry, a couple months into a brand new church plant project with my best friend, I had to quit and moved back home to Canada for a time – my health had broken and the undiagnosed depression and anxiety had gotten the best of me. I just couldn’t physically cope anymore.

About 18 months later, after a doctor told me that the stress was killing me and I needed to do something about it, I removed my membership from the church to give myself “time and space to heal” – not because my beliefs had changed in any way, with no intention of staying away. It would be about 8 years of struggling later that I even discovered that Religious Trauma was a thing and that there were reasons I felt soooooo STUCK.

After thousands of dollars on therapy and coaching programs, I began to work on myself with a counselor who understood religious trauma. Things started to shift for me at an actual root level this time. This wasn’t temporary like the other things I had done to heal. I began to feel unstuck. I began to feel ALIVE. I began to feel serenity. I began to trust myself. It was incredible. And I knew that I had to learn these skills so I could help others in the way I was helped.

I am a Certified Trauma Recovery Coach, Safe & Sound Protocol (SSP) Provider, and Resilience Toolkit Certified Facilitator (Therapeutic Tremoring & other body-based mindfulness and movement tools). My goal with my clients is to hold a space of safety and facilitate healing on the level of the body – where the trauma is stored and did the damage. Cuz that’s where the magic happens.

I was born and raised in Ayr, Scotland for the first 21 years of my life before emigrating to Perth, Australia where I currently reside. I still have the accent however, you can understand me a wee bit better these days.

Apart from family trauma, I have had my own share of religious trauma growing up in Scotland. When I was fourteen I was attacked by two men and the only thing that saved me was that I gave them the right answer to the question, “Are you Catholic or Protestant? There was protestant and catholic soccer teams which would end in violence. There was segregation in schools, bombings, division and hatred. Seeing the hypocrisy and violence in the name of religion really impacted me. Growing up seeing this I felt there had to be a better way. Some years later I would go see the Dalai Lama give a teaching he said, “whenever you see a religious person become violent, they cease to be religious”. This led me to form the belief that we all have a responsibility to work on ourselves and try to walk in integrity rather than expect others to do it for us.

For some reason my nature has been and still is somewhat rebellious. There’s something in the water in Scotland that feeds your freedom gene (Go Braveheart).

When I was younger I rebelled against my traumatic family life, my religious upbringing, the education system and authority in general. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned to channel this in positive ways, realizing that the tyrant I was rebelling against was actually within. This was the beginning of my journey inwards and how to free myself from the shackles of the mind that I had created.

This journey inward started with my own deep dive into the study of religions and the nature of consciousness in 1996. I studied and taught classical forms of meditation and mindfulness for over 20 years. I found a lot of satisfaction facilitating weekly groups, helping others see their own self-defeating patterns, and how to transcend those patterns through connecting them with their authentic strength and truth within. I felt a respect for all religions yet at the same time, because of what I witnessed growing up, understanding how they can be harmful to others. In fact, seeing how religions can be used to manipulate to others, I am very sensitive to authoritarianism.

When I was a child I grew up in a house where there was always music. My father was a musician and a music teacher and when I was ten years old, I started my path as a musician playing guitar, saxophone and eventually going to university and becoming a music teacher myself. As a teenager I realized there is something healing and transformative about music as it helped me rise above challenging times.

In 2012 I wanted to help others create and be the change that they seek, this led me into the coaching profession. This included becoming a certified Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP)  master practitioner and a certified coach. In 2015 I published a book entitled “Know Your Mindfulness”.

This journey called life and the knowledge I have gained along the way is directed at one outcome:

To connect you with that part of yourself within that can rise above any trauma and live a life of authenticity, trusting in your heart and your own abilities.

My parents joined the LDS (Mormon) church when I was five years old, and I grew up a fully believing member. In the beginning, I felt peace in the legalistic structure and orthodox teachings and belonging in the community. I was actively engaged throughout my life, marrying in the temple and passionately dedicating every day of my life in the service of others.

When I returned to college in my 40s, I opened myself to ideas I’d never been exposed to before and began to analyze my beliefs from a less biased lens. I became aware of unhealthy relationship dynamics in my community and conditioned fear, obligation and shame within myself. I outgrew my lifelong faith and began shedding layers of trauma and self-doubt.

Now I embrace sovereignty over my life decisions. I delight in authentic relationships and feel fully able to offer unconditional love to all. It is my passion to help others who have experienced religious trauma or spiritual abuse. Questioning or leaving a high demand group is not a journey for wimps! You may be struggling with your identity, career, relationships, spirituality, morals, gender or sexuality, what you eat, how you spend your time, and the list goes on and on.

My goal is that you will feel accepted and validated being your true self whether you are seeking to heal toxic patterns or to implement positive changes. I provide a nonjudgmental, safe place for you to explore the changes that are healthiest and doable for you. I am flexible and will check in with you regularly regarding what does or does not work for you.

I earned my Master of Social Work from Eastern Washington University and my Bachelor of Arts in Communication Studies from Western Washington University. I am currently an LMHCA and LSWAIC in Washington state and a member of National Association of Social Workers WA. I am fully trained in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and Hypnotherapy.

I have experience working with individuals that might be struggling with narcissistic abuse, acute and complex trauma, life transitions, grief and loss, depression, anxiety, low self-confidence, codependence, communication, and boundaries.

At your own pace, I will help you gain insight, improve resilience, and stay focused on your goals. I encourage healthy coping skills and self-care to improve your ability to function. I advocate for setting healthy boundaries, building self-awareness, and finding balance in your life so you feel empowered to not only survive, but to thrive!