About Me.

Thank you for taking the time to look into who I am. I fully believe that finding a professional who feels like “a match” for such important services during difficult times is essential to moving forward.

I single-parented two now-adult children. I am also a psychologist who has worked for 30 years helping to elevate families to healthier levels of functioning. I believe the ultimate goal in difficult situations is to achieve an environment where kids can thrive, and where they are insulated from the more negative emotional aspects of divorce and separation. My goal is to create a “greenhouse” to insulate children from acrimony, prevent alliance conflicts, and create a nurturing environment in which they can grow as healthy adults.

My work the last 30 years has been in the evaluation of family systems, particularly with abuse and neglect, and emotional abuse in the context of high conflict custody. While I am proud of the reputation I have earned with other professionals as both a fair and thorough clinician, I am most proud of the feedback I get from families about how I have helped their families get to a better place — how I helped them and their children out of the most difficult time of their lives by extending kindness, compassion, and expertise.

My approach is to identify patterns and behaviors that are both helpful and harmful to children in both the short and long term, and to coach families on pathways to remedy to the negative and promote optimal emotional outcome for children. Our goal should be to have kids feel they can love and enjoy both parents, feel safe with both, and ultimately, not feel stressed at the school play or future big life events. My goal is to help the village who loves them to work together to make a happy life for the child in the face of divorce. To me, it is imperative that people understand WHY behavior must change to want to make change.

I totally get that at times that is hard, very hard, and feels impossible. I get that it takes the cooperation of everyone to make it happen. Nothing is perfect, but I try to get families as close as I can to that for their children, because if nothing changes, nothing changes.

A little more about me, I am a BIG Disney and Hurricanes hockey fan, and a lover of all things kitsch in travel and at home. I am a cancer survivor, and a person who believes hardships often are the very things that catapult us to the next level of play in life.

For more information about my work and credentials, you can download a copy of my CV here.