ABOUT
Complexity requires range.
I did not take a particularly direct route into clinical work.
For more than a decade, I worked in U.S. defense and intelligence, including ten years in civilian intelligence supporting U.S. Special Operations. Much of that work involved trying to make sense of situations in which the information was incomplete, the interests were competing, and the obvious explanation was not necessarily the right one.
It made curiosity useful and certainty something to be earned.
In 2016, the nature of my work changed considerably. I became involved in humanitarian and mental health initiatives across the Middle East and East Africa, including direct work with Yazidi survivors of ISIS captivity and genocide.
The distance between analyzing a conflict and sitting across from someone who had survived one is considerable.
Eventually, my attention moved increasingly toward the individual: how experiences shape us, why certain responses persist long after the circumstances that produced them have changed, and, most interestingly, what allows those responses to change.
That brought me to clinical mental health.
I had already completed graduate study in women's studies at UCLA and political science at the University of California, Riverside. I later earned my master's in clinical mental health counseling at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.
Today, I work in two distinct areas: psychotherapy and advisory.
They are different practices, but both suit something that has interested me throughout my career: situations that are not quite what they appear to be.
There is a certain satisfaction in discovering that what seemed immovable is not.
I am a Licensed Professional Counselor in Illinois, with clinical practices forthcoming in Illinois and California.
Advisory and psychotherapy are separate services. Advisory is not psychotherapy and does not include mental health diagnosis or treatment.