I am a highly qualified psychotherapist with extensive management and teaching experience. My areas of specialty include diversity/cultural sensitivity, gender/sexual orientation, barriers to academic success, substance abuse/addiction, mind-body work, and family systems. In addition, I have experience and training in the areas of family violence, child sexual abuse, grief and bereavement, correct
ions, and chronic mental illness. My theoretical preference is a combination of cognitive, cognitive-behavioral, humanistic, and existential techniques, and my work focuses as much on process as on content. As part of my work in schools, I taught various types of whole-classroom social-emotional groups, encouraging young people to discover and name their true selves in the midst of competing, and often conformist, environmental forces. My other academic experiences include teaching English in France, psychology, anatomy/kinesiology, and psychotherapeutic practice courses to adults, social work history/policy and data analysis to graduate students, and Psychology, Choral Music, French, and Algebra to high school students. I am also interested in collaborative work with other academic and civic institutions. In the States, I worked with four universities as a field supervisor for their graduate or undergraduate students in social work, counseling, and substance abuse. I presented educational workshops to school faculty and staff, adult students, mental health clinicians, and members of state-wide coalitions on various topics related to my areas of expertise, including risk assessment/management, substance abuse, sexuality/gender, Restorative Practices, Cognitive Behavioral Interventions for Trauma in Schools (CBITS), Positive Behavior Intervention and Support (PBIS), and Youth Mental Health First Aid. My current project is to create an exchange/collaboration between the Loyola University (New Orleans) School of Music and the Conservatoire National à Rayonnement Régional (CNRR) in Marseille. In addition to the PhD, I have a Master of Science in Social Work and 30 additional post-graduate hours in Pastoral Counseling. This last course of study gives me a unique perspective on subjects such as spirituality, meaning and purpose, connection and disconnection, and suffering and death. I also have a Bachelor of Music in Voice Performance, continuing to sing professionally even as I have worked as a psychotherapist; and this has informed my use of creativity in working with students. Lastly, I was licensed in massage therapy for fifteen years (2000-2015), so I have a strong sense of both ways the human body manifests and holds stress and methods to use physical activity (and breath) to cope with that stress.
