I am a LCMHCS, and have been practicing since 2005 where I have worked in community mental health, hospitals, and long-term care facilities. Since 2017, I have been serving individuals in my private practice, Songbird Counseling & Consultation, PLLC,  which is currently in Sylva, NC. The name of my business was born out of a wave of grief, losing my mother. Birds have a powerful message and song to be heard. I really began to experience my own aliveness in the wake of such immense loss and grief. Aliveness and Loss…isn’t that a duality!

I have completed six years of extensive training at the Appalachian Gestalt Institute and my role as clinician and supervisor mirrors this way of living and being, using the present moment as the way to move through and forward. I am EMDR trained, which marries well with Gestalt principles and practice.

I have served all ages in my 20+ years of clinical work, including young children and families to the senior population, earning my Gerontology certificate from WCU and a M.Ed. in Community Counseling in 2005. I have been supervising since 2008 and have collectively supervised over 50+ people, including those for board licensure and other supervisors.

 Throughout my career, I have weaved grief into my work with clients in all seasons of life and find that grief starts at birth. Grief is any reaction to a loss. Grief work is essential for growth and movement towards a wholeness of self. We can only expect to feel the depths of joy at the same extent that we allow ourselves to experience and feel our grief.

Accessing the well of our grief, creates aliveness, an authentic experience of self. 

I have a passion for sharing with the world the universal experience of grief and how that binds us to one another and mostly, to ourselves. Grief is the thread that is evident in my practice, despite what issues arise in my therapy office. How we grieve largely depends on how we learned to attach at a young age, which lends to how deep and wide we are willing to attach to ourselves. How in which I show up with clients is somatic in nature, tuning into the body and quieting the brain, building tolerance to sit in what "is, right now", as this is how we arrive at our next destination.