My Therapeutic Approach
My work is grounded in the belief that healing happens in relationship with other people, with the living world around us, and with the deeper currents of our own inner life. To support healing, I primarily draw on three interconnected frameworks: Relational-Cultural Therapy, Ecotherapy, and Buddhist Psychology.
We all need empathetic, mutual, and encouraging relationships to change and grow.
Therapy is one of those relationships. I offer a relational, neuroscience, and nature-based approach that can address your unique concerns and foster healing.
Grounded in connection and relationship.
You matter.
Nature-deficit disorder describes the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses. The disorder can be detected in individuals, families, and communities.
Richard Louv
Relational-Cultural Therapy (RCT) was developed by Jean Baker Miller and her colleagues at the Stone Center, and it begins with a simple but radical premise: we grow through connection, not separation. Much of what we call psychological distress is actually the pain of disconnection from others, from community, from our own sense of worth. RCT helps us examine how power, privilege, and cultural messages shape our relationships and how we move through the world. In our work together, this means I'm less interested in "fixing" you and more interested in building a genuinely mutual, growth-fostering relationship where you feel truly seen.
In the development of my practice of RCT I came to an awareness while meditating with an oak tree: My primary relationship is with the earth, and I felt an authentic desire arising to reconnect with the wild within and without. Through this orientation and exploration, I came upon ecopsychology.
Ecotherapy, the practice of ecopsychology, recognizes something humans have always known but modern life often obscures: we are not separate from nature; we are nature. Our nervous systems evolved in conversation with the more-than-human world. Birdsong, seasons, soil, water. Ecotherapy invites the natural world back into the healing process, whether through outdoor sessions, nature-based reflection, or simply by attuning to the rhythms of our bodies as part of the living earth. When we restore our sense of belonging to the natural world, we often find that our sense of belonging to life itself begins to return.
Buddhist Psychology offers an ancient map of the mind I find remarkably practical and backed by neuroscience. Rather than seeing suffering as something wrong with you, it understands suffering as part of being human and offers concrete practices for working with it: mindfulness, self-compassion, an honest look at impermanence and the ways we cling to what cannot last. Drawing on these teachings, I support clients in developing a gentler, clearer relationship with their own thoughts and emotions, one that creates space from struggle.
Where these lenses meet is what I find most alive in my practice. RCT teaches us that we heal in relationship. Ecotherapy expands our sense of what counts as relationship to include the land, the seasons, the bodies we inhabit. Buddhist Psychology offers a way of being present with all of being alive the joy and the grief, the connection and the loss without being swept away. Together, they form an approach that is relational at its core, rooted in the earth, and oriented toward presence and compassion rather than performance or perfection. I love learning, so I continue to study and practice these ways of being, as well as explore other complimentary areas like Non Violent Communication/the language of feelings and needs, Sarah Peyton's work with resonance, bibliotherapy, Heart Math+, yoga, Wilderness First Aid, bushcraft and wild ancestral skills/homesteading.
I value beauty, relationship, play, curiosity, practice, simplicity, and the paradox of finding and maintaining balance through awareness of imbalance and gentle attunement.
