About Me

As a psychologist, I received extensive training prior to becoming licensed. My doctorate in Counseling Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison involved multiple years of supervised clinical practice in a variety of settings, including a community non-profit offering free services to at-risk teens and their families, a psychiatric outpatient clinic, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison counseling center. As the final step towards my degree, I completed my pre-doctoral internship at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale's Counseling and Psychological Services, with a concentration in Integrated Health Care, which promotes closer and more effective working relationships between therapists, primary care providers, and psychiatric prescribers. 

Prior to licensure, I worked as a post-doctoral resident at Compass Health Network in Wentzville, which has a mission of supporting underserved populations. I have been in private practice since becoming a licensed psychologist and have experience and training in providing services to individuals, groups, families, and couples, though I exclusively provide individual and couples counseling to adults at the moment.

I have several years of training in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), including participation in a full model DBT program, which included providing individual DBT therapy, leading a skills group, providing 24/7 phone coaching, and participating in a consultation team for DBT clinicians. DBT was originally developed for individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder and has since been shown to be an effective treatment for a variety of other groups who are responding to intense emotions with ineffective behaviors. DBT helps people to increase their self-awareness in the present, better regulate their emotions, tolerate crises without making things worse, and improve the quality of their relationships.

I have witnessed this treatment radically improve people's lives and I use skills learned from DBT every day to improve my own life. DBT informs my therapeutic approach in a variety of ways, including a non-judgmental stance, use of dialectical (both/and) thinking, and understanding the damage chronic invalidation can cause.