ABOUT ME:
Welcome to my website. I am currently in private practice in Seattle, WA, working with adults, couples, adolescents, mothers and infants, and family combinations (i.e. mothers and daughters, etc.). I have lived and studied in Seattle for over 30 years now. I feel honored to be able to do the work I do with the variety of people I have been fortunate to work with.
I was born in a very small, rural town in South Dakota and then moved frequently around the mid-west. During my undergraduate studies of psychology and theatre in Missoula, MT, a psychology professor encouraged me to study theatre more seriously and helped me to obtain a scholarship to London University in psychology if I agreed to take theatre classes while I was there. I did. Upon my return to the states I focused more seriously on my studies as an actress and attended graduate school at the Professional Actor Training Program at SMU. Unbeknownst to me, this was honestly both the beginning of my career as a professional actress as well as my future in psychotherapy. The intense study of myself accompanied with the serious work of embodying a character has become the foundation of my life’s work.
I continued to work professionally in the theatre in Dallas, New York, and regional theatre companies across the country. This work brought me to Seattle in 1984 where I had a very successful career in theatre, radio, movies and commercials. I felt pulled back into psychology in the late ‘80’s and graduated from Antioch University. My studies continued in a variety of ways and ultimately took me to the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (http://npsi.us.com). Ten years of study later I became a full member of NPSI and a Fellow of the International Psychoanalytic Association (http.//www,ipa.org.uk).
My study as an actress was focused on the honest expression and embodiment of whatever character I was portraying. Shakespeare was the backbone of my creative studies and comedic roles fueled my sense of the importance of humor. I was schooled in exploring not only the words the character spoke but the world they came out of, the context of their lives and first and foremost, their values, desires, obstacles and the nature of their relationships in shaping their identity.
I realized, as my theatre professors were always telling me, that the most interesting characters we encounter are those that are living and breathing human beings. This is what took me back to psychology and the desire to explore the complexity of human beings facing the challenges of becoming who they are.
British Object Relations is my theoretical foundation. The focus of this theory sits strongly on the foundation of relationships, the primacy of the emotional world, the primal nature of disappointment, and the way that habitual patterns, mostly unconscious, continue to limit our sense of choice and growth.
As well as my psychoanalytic psychotherapy practice, I offer supervision for therapists working towards their licensure requirements for the state of Washington and/or those wanting to explore a more object relational model of therapy.
I teach at various institutes in the city and recently chaired the 2016 Evolving British Object Relations Conference, which focused on the dialogue between neuroscience and psychoanalysis. This continues to interest me.