I was just trying to get my own shit together!

Along the way, I discovered something that changed everything for me: healing wasn't just about understanding what had happened to me. It was about learning how to think differently, respond differently, relate differently, and ultimately live differently.

Once I experienced that shift for myself, I couldn't unsee it.

I started working with other survivors, and I began noticing the same things over and over again. People understood what had happened to them. They could explain their trauma. They had read the books, gone to therapy, talked about their childhoods, and learned plenty about their symptoms.

And yet they were still struggling to actually live the lives they wanted.

So I kept digging.

I studied. I trained. I paid attention to what actually helped the people I worked with move forward. I drew from my background in counseling psychology, my study of neuroscience, my own recovery, and what I was learning from years of working directly with survivors.

Over time, all of those pieces started coming together into something I could teach.

I've been using and refining this approach with survivors since 2007. And the more I worked with people, the more convinced I became that survivors don't have to spend the rest of their lives managing the aftermath of what happened to them.

Eventually, I realized this work didn't have to live only inside the one-on-one work I was doing with my clients. I had spent years putting these ideas together, refining the process, and figuring out how to explain it in a way that survivors could actually use.

So I wrote it down.

That's how Beyond Surviving: The Final Stage in Recovery from Sexual Abuse came to be.

The book grew out of the same work I had been doing with survivors for years. It wasn't something I dreamed up at a desk and then decided to teach. It was the other way around.

And today, this is what I do.

I help survivors move beyond simply understanding their past so they can start creating something different for their future.

I hold an M.A. in Counseling Psychology, and my work draws from psychology, neuroscience, lived experience, and nearly two decades of working directly with survivors.

I use coaching rather than a therapeutic model because my focus isn't on treating you as broken or damaged.

It's on helping you figure out where you want to go from here - and then helping you get there!