I work with older adolescents, adult individuals, couples, and families searching for more fulfilling relationships, more satisfying work, and an overall more meaningful life. My primary areas of therapeutic interest and experience include eating disorders, mood disorders, substance abuse, trauma, self-injury, personality disorders, and women's issues. I love working with people who struggle with self-destructive behaviors, which often emerge initially as a way to cope with pain that feels too unbearable to tolerate and culminate in some form of crisis. The english word crisis comes from the root word krei, meaning to sieve or to sift. I believe that points of crisis can be invitations to sift through what does and does not work, matter, or serve us. My approach uses an active clinician role in the therapeutic relationship to a) help make the unbearable pain more tolerable, b) establish ways to connect with a more meaningful life, and c) take active steps to discover alternate ways of coping with distress. Therapeutic techniques come from Dialectical Behavior Therapy, 12-step facilitation, Cognitive Behavior Therapy, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, and spiritual exploration. I earned both my Master of Social Work and Bachelor of Social Work degrees from Loyola University Chicago. Prior to working on in an outpatient setting, I worked both in residential and partial hospitalization levels of care both in administrative and clinical capacities.