Specialties
Focused care for trauma, dissociation, anxiety, and relationships.
Below is a closer look at the concerns I most often work with, what people commonly experience, and how counseling may help.
Trauma & PTSD
Trauma is less about the event itself than about what it did to your sense of safety. When the nervous system stays braced for danger, ordinary life can feel exhausting.
Common experiences
- Intrusive memories, flashbacks, or nightmares
- Feeling constantly alert or easily startled
- Avoiding reminders, places, or conversations
- Difficulty sleeping or concentrating
How counseling may help
Counseling can help you understand these responses as protective rather than defective, reduce their intensity, and rebuild a sense of choice in daily life.
Approach
Stabilization and resourcing first, then EMDR or other processing approaches when preparation is in place.
Complex Trauma
When difficult experiences begin early or repeat over years, they shape more than memory — they shape identity, relationships, and what feels possible.
Common experiences
- Long-standing shame or harsh self-criticism
- Difficulty trusting or feeling close to others
- Emotions that swing between too much and too little
- A sense of never quite feeling safe
How counseling may help
Counseling can offer a steady relationship in which patterns become understandable, self-compassion becomes possible, and change accumulates gradually.
Approach
Phase-oriented, parts-informed care with attention to pacing, relationship, and regulation.
Dissociation, DID & OSDD
Dissociation is a common human response to overwhelming experience. For some people it becomes a lasting way of managing what could not be faced all at once.
Common experiences
- Memory gaps or lost time
- Feeling detached from your body or emotions
- Surroundings feeling unreal or distant
- Internal conflict, or parts of self with different needs and views
- Identity disruption or discontinuity
How counseling may help
Counseling can support safety, daily functioning, internal communication, and cooperation among parts of self — without pressure to change how you understand your own experience.
Approach
Stabilization-focused, ego-state and parts-informed work grounded in collaboration. A formal DID or OSDD diagnosis is not required, and diagnostic claims are never made from a website.
Anxiety & Panic
Anxiety often makes sense once we understand what it is trying to prevent. Panic can feel sudden, but it usually has a history worth listening to.
Common experiences
- Persistent worry or anticipating the worst
- Panic attacks or fear of having one
- Physical tension, restlessness, or trouble sleeping
- Avoiding situations that once felt manageable
How counseling may help
Counseling can reduce the frequency and intensity of symptoms while addressing what maintains them, so relief is not only temporary.
Approach
Body-aware regulation skills, person-centered exploration, and trauma-informed work where anxiety is trauma-related.
Couples & Relationships
Most couples are not fighting about the dishes. Underneath recurring conflict there is usually a question about whether the other person is still reachable.
Common experiences
- The same argument on repeat
- Emotional distance or roommate-like living
- Trust broken by an affair or attachment injury
- Strain from parenting, illness, or major transitions
How counseling may help
Counseling can help you interrupt the cycle, understand the emotions driving it, and build a more secure connection you can return to.
Approach
Emotionally Focused Therapy and attachment-focused couples work, with sensitivity to individual trauma histories.
Grief & Life Transitions
Grief is not limited to death. It also follows the loss of a role, a relationship, a community, a faith, or a version of the future you had expected.
Common experiences
- Waves of sadness, numbness, or unexpected anger
- Feeling unmoored after a major change
- Caregiver fatigue and the loss of one's own rhythms
- Questions about identity, purpose, or belonging
How counseling may help
Counseling can offer a place where loss is taken seriously and where you can gradually reconnect with meaning and direction.
Approach
Person-centered counseling with trauma-informed support when loss has been sudden or traumatic.
You do not have to navigate this alone.
If you are wondering whether Flourish may be a good fit, you are welcome to reach out and begin with a consultation.