You used to do what?

Recovering computer engineer and IT manager!

Psychology has always been a love of mine, but I didn't make it a career until I'd spent several years as a computer engineer. (Weird, huh?) As an undergraduate I took Psychology classes for fun while getting a BS in Mathematics and Computer Science. It took me a few years to figure out that communicating with computers was a rather one-sided interaction and they were often uncooperative.

In order to feed my love of psychology and working with people, I volunteered for a mental health center after hours hotline and for my local hospice organization. Both of these experiences left me longing to do this work professionally, so I decided to go back to school to get an MA in Psychology. I was licensed by the North Carolina Psychology Board in 19​95 and have loved every minute of my new career.

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Now, if you are struggling and looking for a therapist, I bet that you already know that life can be full of twists and turns. What we often plan is not reality. My story is no different.  While in graduate school, I was the only person in my program focusing on end-of-life issues and grief counseling. (They teased me and called me The Death Queen!)  The plan was to work for a hospice organization.  Soon after I graduated, my focus changed completely when my new  supervisor told me that she was going to teach a class in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT).  I signed up not because I thought it would be a great thing to learn, but because I wanted to impress my new supervisor.  That experience changed the entire course of my career. Not only that, but the clients that kept showing up for me were adolescents!

​Most of my training is cognitive-behavioral which means that I assist clients who want to understand and change behaviors by helping them:

• identify ineffective behaviors and/or thought processes
• learn new behaviors and new ways of thinking
• understand how their beliefs or thoughts about themselves may interfere in the process