Counseling begins with being truly heard.
Sometimes what we need most is a place where we can be seen, heard, and understood.
I believe counseling is a collaborative process. You bring the expertise of knowing yourself and your story; I bring clinical knowledge, thoughtful questions, and a willingness to challenge you when it may be helpful. Together, we make space to understand what you're experiencing and discover what moving forward can look like for you.
The counselor behind Rooted Resilience
My path to becoming a counselor began long before I ever stepped into a counseling program. After losing my father when I was nine, I experienced firsthand what it was like to carry difficult things without always having someone who knew how to help me make sense of them. Later experiences with counselors reinforced something that would eventually shape my career: pain doesn't need to be compared, justified, or “bad enough” to deserve care.
Those experiences didn't give me all the answers, but they did give me a very clear sense of the kind of counselor I wanted to become. I wanted to be someone who would listen without comparing, make room for the difficult parts of someone's story, and be willing to stay with them when there wasn't an easy answer or quick solution.
My path to counseling
My counseling career began in schools, where I discovered how much I value walking alongside people during some of life's most formative and challenging moments. Over the years, that work has shaped the way I approach counseling: listen first, ask honest questions, and help people make sense of their own experiences rather than telling them what they should think or feel.
For more than a decade, I have worked as a high school counselor, walking alongside teenagers and their families through academic pressures, relationships, family challenges, loss, identity development, and the many transitions that come with growing up. Working so closely with both teens and parents has taught me that two people can experience the same situation very differently—and both experiences can still be real.
My work eventually expanded beyond the school setting into clinical mental health counseling, allowing me to work with clients across different stages of life. That transition gave me something I had often wished I could offer in schools: more time. Time to sit with difficult emotions, allow silence, explore the experiences underneath what someone is feeling, and move at a pace that fits the person rather than the clock.
Today, my clinical work includes clients from adolescence through later adulthood. While the circumstances that bring people to counseling may look different across the lifespan, I continue to believe that people deserve a place where their experiences can be acknowledged without judgment or comparison. Rooted Resilience grew from that belief—a place where the difficult parts of your story can be honored without becoming the entirety of who you are, and where counseling can help you recognize and cultivate the strength that was there all along.
Hope doesn't require us to pretend everything is okay.
Faith & Counseling
For some people, faith is an important part of how they understand themselves, their experiences, and the world around them. If your faith is meaningful to you, it can have a place in our work together.
My own Christian faith has shaped the way I understand hope, purpose, grace, and resilience. At the same time, I believe counseling should make room for your beliefs, values, and experiences—not ask you to adopt mine. Faith will never be imposed or assumed. When it is important to you, we can explore how it connects with what you're experiencing and the life you want to build.
What feels possible from here?
You don’t have to know exactly where you’re going to begin. We can start by understanding where you are, exploring what you want to be different, and deciding what moving forward looks like for you.