Integrity Counseling

Professional Info: If you read my backstory you’ll understand this better, but I’ve come to really enjoy working with issues of emotional dysregulation, borderline personality, and trauma. I am a Certified Clinical Trauma Professional (CCTP), Personality Disorders (C-PD), and also Dialectical Behavior Therapy (C-DBT). I enjoy working with youth and am a Certified Youth Mental Health Specialist (CYMHS). I provide telehealth as well as in-person sessions and currently aim at ages 13 and up, but might considered working with younger kids depending on the situation and if they’re local.

Blog Links: My philosophy of counseling, the ethics of religion in counseling, parent involvement in therapy, thoughts on borderline personality, and a discussion of my approach to sexual trauma in particular.

Backstory: I actually wanted to be a therapist since about 8th grade and started reading textbooks from my dad’s one college psych class. Probably read more about Freud than anyone should, but ah well. I also got into the (probably annoying) habit of trying to play referee in all my friends’ drama during high school. Yeah, that could have ended badly. 😅
  I’d rather not count how many years exactly, but I’ve been officially working in mental health since 1996. While I completed my master’s degree in the early 2000s, I provided therapeutic residential treatment, mostly for teens. This typically involved kids coming out of psychiatric hospitalization or trying to avoid going in.

  After completing my Master’s in school counseling, I worked primarily at the elementary level, but also some high-school, and started several programs for gifted students. After watching other service providers coming into the schools to provide actual therapy, I became a bit jealous that they got to focus on treatment while I had to be more focused on testing and organization.

  I decided to move into clinical work, took a few more classes for my license, and spent about 10 years providing and supervising community-based crisis services. I must say I really enjoyed the adventure; you really could not make up some of the things my team and I saw. I worked with all ages and all kinds of diagnoses, from schizophrenic senior adults, to suicidal / self-injurious 20-somethings, and ADHD 5 year olds.

  During the mid-2010s, I became very interested in borderline personality and started to have more success with that population than other providers I talked to. For quite a while I read any clinical research I could find on the topic. When I began to recognize the impact of trauma, I started looking for trainings specific to trauma treatment. Although I didn’t exactly plan it, this developed into a strong focus on sexual assault and particularly survivors of female sexual perpetrators. — Perhaps being male increases the comfort talking about this particular topic, but if I were to guess I’d say it makes up 40% my sexual abuse cases.

  Around 2017, I started moving toward exclusively providing outpatient therapy and opened Integrity Counseling. I’ve focused on a lot of the things I saw during my crisis work: borderline personality, bipolar, trauma, and other issues of emotional regulation such as depression and self-injurious behavior. Moving into trauma work has also given me the privilege of working with a diverse client base, including combat PTSD veterans and first responders.
  Last but not least, as I mentioned, I enjoy working with teenagers and gifted. Maybe I should list it under special skills, but I never get tired of listening to teen drama. 🙂