Are you experiencing the depth of connection, and vitality that you want in your primary relationship? Does a ten-minute phone call with your mother transform adult-you into an approval-starved child or defensive teen-ager? Are you and your children engaged in the loving and mutually respectful relationships that nurture everyone in the home? Has your life taken on a flat, purposeless quality?

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Human Systems Therapy
The Possibility Approach: Rather than viewing dysfunction as existing discretely within the individual alone, I hold the holistic, systems-based view that emotional health and vibrancy is the product of the interaction between an individual and his/her many-layered relationships. In my practice, I am the collaborator who wakes clients to the manner in which they co-create the very experiences and situations that are most distressing to them. I support people in freeing themselves from the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that do not serve them, so they may move from positions of unconscious pre-programmed reactivity, to places of conscious and intentional creation. The most joy-filled moments of my work come when I witness a client's reality shift from a view of no-choice entrapment, to the reality of infinite possibility.

Types of Counseling Provided:
I work with individuals, couples, and groups, with a therapeutic focus on interpersonal relationships, conflict resolution, parenting, sex and intimacy, divorce-counseling, and family-of-origin.

Other Services Offered:
Ritual Facilitation and Rites of Passage

Education, Training, and Experience:
First, graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Washington, I then received an MA in Applied Behavioral Science with an emphasis on systems counseling, from Bastyr University (LIOS). In addition, I have completed certificate programs in mediation, and professional labor support. As the founder of Northwest Attachment Parenting, I worked for many years in the not-for-profit sector, facilitating support groups for parents, and have also gained wide experience counseling sexual and gender minorities. A deep commitment to lifelong learning lives in me, so I am always in the process of seeking new experiences that will add to my professional skill and personal growth.

What's up with the "ABS"?

People who practice therapy in the state of Washington have all kinds of degrees. There are MA Psych {Masters of Psychology} practitioners, and MSW {Masters of Social Work}, M. Ed {Masters of Education}, M. Div, {Master of Divinity}, MA M.T. {Masters of Music Therapy}, MA ABS {Applied Behavioral Science, which is what I have}, and any number of other designations. (In fact to be a registered counselor in the state of Washington one does not need to have a Masters degree at all.) But though therapists come from a wide variety of educational backgrounds, only a percentage specify an educational designation after their names. I have often wished for the sake of mental health consumers that more therapists would specify a degree on their sites and business cards, in the effort to educate the public more about the different avenues available for psychotherapy work. I think most people assume when they see the naked "MA" on a therapist's business card that the degree is for psychology, not realizing how much choice there is when it comes to therapy for the psyche and that there are lots and lots of different schools of thought, and models, and techniques to choose from. In the history of my practice, I have, on occasion, seen therapist business cards delineating both the MA Psych, and the MA Ed, but it has been pretty rare.

The "MA ABS" is not so unusual, at least not in our neck of the woods, which is well populated by graduates of Bastyr's Leadership Institute of Seattle (LIOS). We LIOS graduates tend to be pretty sold on the systemic focus of our education, and many, myself included, do what they can to educate the public on the uniquely therapeutic benefits of Applied Behavioral Science. It is material to my practice that I delineate myself from those who have received masters degrees in other disciplines, just as I would imagine a practitioner with an M.Div might want to specify her degree, to give potential clients a window on the spiritual world-view they would be purchasing if they chose her practice.

What does the LIOS "ABS" education offer?

1) Experiential Training: Many programs preparing students to practice therapy on the human psyche are almost entirely taught by lecture and reading, with very little practice in the art itself. The applied behavioral program at LIOS is not just "book learning". It's learning by doing. We spend a lot of time doing "therapy" on each other in mock sessions - learning to think on our feet, and manage the anxiety of being in the emotional "hot seat" of the therapist's chair.

2) Emphasis on the Self of the Therapist - In one example of experiential training, the school maintains a demanding focus on student therapists doing their own personal psyche-healing work, with a rigor that exceeds even the considerable academic demands. The intent is to minimize a number of pitfalls common to the therapeutic community like: the therapist viewing the client as a victim of his/her situation, taking a client's reactivity personally, the therapist disempowering the client by falling into the role of "rescuer", and projecting the therapist's own similar personal life-circumstances on the client situation and then believing s/he "knows what's going on" (or what the client "should" do). Finally the LIOS insistence that students learn to hold center under pressure is a buffer against the burn-out which is rampant in the therapeutic community among therapists who are unable to form healthy boundaries between themselves and the suffering of their clients.

3) Non Pathology-Focused: The LIOS program is non-pathology-focused. It would take an entire article for me to outline the radical departure this stance is from traditional psychotherapeutic doctrine, so let me just give a couple of examples. Let me first acknowledge that I am speaking in generalizations. My colleagues and I hold a general belief that if people are not happy in life, rather than studying their victimization, it is far more useful for them to focus attention on their internal thought processes and external behaviors to figure out how they are creating the very situations from which they want to escape. We try to help people become conscious of themselves as the authors of their own lives, and life experiences. In addition, we hold that people are generally more capable and less messed up than they think they are. We like to find and look at what IS working and build on that rather, than focusing attention on and rehashing all the things that are not working. Applied behavioral science is highly strength-based.

4) Systemic Focus: All the models we study in school have a systemic focus. Applied behavioral scientists see the world in systems. (An individual is not a single discrete unit, but an element imbedded in a multilayered series of groups that include but are not limited to: family you were born to, family you have created, friends, work group, community and culture.) We hold that the groups in which you are embedded are unconsciously invested in you remaining the way you are, even when they are pressuring you to change. We maintain that you are unconsciously helping to maintain the systems you hate - training the people around you to treat you the way you most don't want - as they do the same to you. So a lot of our work is about assisting clients in waking up to the behavioral patterns within systems - the patterns of behavior between you and all the people around you with whom you interact, so you can begin to consciously change the interactions, retraining your systems as you re-train yourself.

5) Multi-body emphasis: One aspect of systems focus is the specialized training we get in working with more than one person in the room, which is why many of us go on to get the added post-graduate licensure of MFT . Many LIOS graduates list on their business cards MA/ABS MFT - which, if you couldn't before, you now know how to read! I worry a little when I consider how many therapists currently doing couples and family work have never had any training in it. Multi-body work is different from individual therapy in countless numbers of ways.

Approaches to psychotherapy are varied, so I want to be clear that I do not preclude the possibility that a therapist with a different kind of MA will not embody some, or maybe even all of the above aspects in their practice. Gifted people come from lots of places. But I KNOW that someone who went to LIOS has had the above basics hammered into them. One of the reasons I so value the "ABS" designation on website and business cards is that it helps me refer clients and friends to practitioners who have been schooled in the things I have seen work the best, the very things I do. I WILL refer people to therapists who do not publish the MA ABS, but only if I have met them personally and heard them talk about their work.

I wish that other practitioners were so proud to display their own education. If more therapists were advertising their specialized areas of expertise, the public would get the opportunity to become more knowledgeable advocates for their own care.