About me
Before I was anyone's therapist, I was the kid nobody could see.
Most people meet me as the clinician, the coach, the person families land with after they've tried everyone else. But if you want to understand why I do this, really why, you have to know who I was long before any of that.
I grew up with a mom who couldn't see beyond the emotional chaos of her divorce from my dad. In the aftermath of it, there wasn't much room left for what I needed, and I became a kid with a whole inner world that nobody around me could see. I learned young what it costs a child to go unseen.
I was bullied, too. Chased home from school, taunted, left on the outside of the friendships and the ordinary belonging that every kid just assumes is coming to them. For a lot of my childhood, I felt more like an observer of everyone else's life than a participant in my own. I watched the world choose other people, over and over, and I quietly built a whole belief system out of it: that I wasn't the kind of kid who got chosen.
And I went through all of it without my dad in reach.
Not because he let me go. Because he wasn't allowed to reach me, in a time when a father fighting to stay in his child's life was too often the one who lost. He fought for years. And it took years more before we found our way back to each other, as an adult, on the other side of all of it.
We lost so much time we can never get back. But we found each other, and something in me that had been unsettled my whole life finally settled. Some of my favorite moments now are the simplest ones with him. He always wanted to give me that. He finally got to.
What I carried into the work
I became a therapist, a behavior consultant, and an executive function coach because I never wanted another kid to spend decades unlearning the belief that they weren't enough. I wanted to be, for other people's kids, the person nobody had been for me.
For twenty years, that's what I did. I worked with the kids everyone else had given up on, the ones labeled lazy, defiant, too much, not enough, and the worn-out, devoted parents who loved them and couldn't understand why nothing was working.
And here's what twenty years taught me: those parents were never the problem. The moms who find their way to me are some of the most loving, selfless people I've ever met. They aren't failing for lack of trying or lack of love. They've been handed the wrong information about what's actually going on inside their kid, and then blamed when the wrong tools didn't work. They were doing everything they were taught to do. They were just taught the wrong things.
And then it came home
I knew all of this professionally long before it became personal. And then it became personal.
When my son James was diagnosed with ADHD at four, I watched the world respond to his hardest moments, the moments he needed the most grace, with shame and dismissal. And something rose up in me I had never felt before. A fierce, non-negotiable love that didn't flinch based on his behavior.
I went up against schools, systems, and every person who told me I was wrong, because I knew, in my body, what it costs a child to not be seen. I had been that child. And I was not going to let him be.
Advocating for my son taught me what unconditional love actually feels like, not as a concept, but as a lived thing. And somewhere in fighting for him, I started to understand that the little girl I used to be had always deserved it too.
James is 17 now. He's thriving. That still gets me, every time.
Why I do this
I don't do this work because I studied it, though I did. I do it because I lived it from both sides: the kid whose inner world nobody could reach, and the mother who refused to let her child feel that same way.
The most powerful thing I can do for a child isn't to fix the child. It's to help their parent finally understand them. Because when a mom truly sees her kid, beneath the behavior, the eye-rolling, the failing grades, the slammed door, everything changes. That mom becomes the person her child can come to. That kid becomes someone who knows they're worth coming home to.
That's the whole thing. That's what I was put here to do.
So if you're the mom reading this with a kid you love desperately and cannot figure out, hear me: this was never about you not loving them enough. You were handed the wrong map. I'd like to give you the right one.
