I have been a certified addiction counselor for 18 years. I have worked for mental health clinics in the state of Georgia for 16 years. My speciality has been working with individuals with co-occurring disorders. Co-occuring means having more than one disorder such as alcohol abuse, or cocaine abuse, depression, anxiety, PTSD, ADHD, etc.. I have specialized in developing groups for people with mental health disorders who have used substances as a way to help self-medicate. These groups were developed from a Double Trouble Recovery perspective to allow individuals to talk about both their mental health issues and substance abuse issues freely. I also work with individuals who used substances and developed mental health disorders because of it as a secondary condition. I work with individuals with chronic pain, eating disorders, sex and gambling addiction. I have been in long-term recovery for 32 years and hope to help you with your own recovery process.

I believe we all have a choice each day to learn how to manager our feelings or let our feelings manage us. Learning how to self-regulate emotions can help with decreasing and preventing anxiety and depression symptoms. I like to begin our first session by earning your trust and maintain it with each session by teaching and modeling basic coping skills. I may also provide a depression or anxiety symptom tracker to help educate and understand your particular symptoms if you have them. The symptom trackers have a scale from 0-3, 0-none, 1 is mild, 2 is moderate and 3 is severe. Using symptom trackers to help you manage symptoms is an excellent tool to measure if my helping you is working or not. In helping clients with depression and anxiety, I've found using symptom trackers to be useful to help you and I measure your progress. Providing psycho-education can help with treating Bipolar, Post Traumatic Stress, Depression and Anxiety Disorders to help understand symptoms and the best therapeutic skills to reduce and prevent them. I work with individuals, couples, and families affected by grief, loss, conflict, and disability by repairing trust, improving communication, and strengthening emotional intimacy with each other. Knowing you can ask for help and have hope to feel better is a great start. I am proud of you for believing in yourself and asking for support!

I specialize in treating trauma by teaching coping skills that empower individuals to feel comfortable in their bodies and with emotions. This can take time. I help to teach and model emotional boundaries with others in order to work through trauma. I use mindfulness techniques and emotion regulation as the main focus with soft-belly breathing, and mind/body scans. I also encourage individuals to find spiritual ways of connecting with a Higher Power to also help with this process. Healing from trauma requires a physical, mental, emotional and spiritual connection to help with this process.