When I was in high school, I had a keychain that was pink, white, and gold plastic and said LOVE. My boyfriend at the time noticed it hanging off the ignition as we were leaving in my car one day and he laughed, saying, “Wow, love even starts your car!” It was funny to us both because he recognized it as a fundamental truth to who I was then (and who I am now): Love and what it takes to make a love relationship work has been a central driving force, interest, and puzzle for my entire life.
I studied love for 20 years as a wedding photographer. I learned a lot about what couples promise each other on their wedding day, when they’re at the beginning of their relationship, at a beautiful venue, dressed up in front of everyone they know and love. But I wondered, what about when things get difficult?
Eventually I wanted more than just to visually document the beginning of a relationship. I wanted to study it, discover what made love work and what caused it not to. And I wanted to know how to help fix it, for myself and others.
When I encountered Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples (EFT) - an empirically validated couples therapy founded by Sue Johnson - it was like someone turning the lights on for me after a lifetime of fumbling around in the dark, struggling in relationships. I could suddenly see my own reactivity and my partner’s and most importantly, I began to understand the deeper attachment longings driving those behaviors.
What had seemed like torturous chaos now had an order and a map I could understand and use. This was nothing short of revolutionary for me in my personal life and I wanted to share it with as many people as I could.
My passion is helping couples and individuals see, understand, and feel the cycle of conflict that’s keeping them stuck in disconnection, frustration, and unhappiness and teach them new ways to interact with each other - ways that lead to connection, emotional safety, belonging, trust, and love.
I am not a sit-back-and-say-nothing therapist. I want to see you get the results you want, and I will absolutely help you do that in an active, warm, loving and direct way, so you can have a different kind of conversation than you’ve likely been able to have with your partner. Or, if we're working individually, to understand your own attachment needs and have awareness and choice about your reactive behaviors in a new way.