Hi, I'm Stacie (she/her)

I know some things about mental health, and I know what my clients have taught me about their experiences over the years, but I will never claim expertise over your life, your needs, or your best course of action. As a social worker, my clinical training and thus my approach to therapy focused on how the world around us impacts our resources, abilities, desires, relationships, and other layers that make us who we are. When the world is thriving as a whole, so are we. When the communities we are in are doing well, we benefit, and vice versa. We all belong to each other in this way. Unfortunately, I became a therapist because the world hasn’t been thriving in a minute, and I wanted to figure out what to do about it. What can we possibly do to feel better when so many of the things that impact our well-being are beyond our control and seem to be in more chaos every day? This is a question I am continuously working to answer alongside my clients.

I believe non-hierarchical partnerships in therapy are far more beneficial for growth than a dynamic centered on expertise and advice. Most of my clients have been in a position of lesser power in relationships time and time again and are seeking to escape that pattern, so why not start in session? In therapy, I offer unconditional support, nonjudgmental feedback, and alternative perspectives on the stories you’ve been told about yourself. I use an intersectional lens that takes into account the way your unique brain works, the obstacles you’ve faced, and the identities you hold.

I invite you to teach me what you know about yourself and what matters to you to lie the groundwork for healing, to define what healing means to you in the first place. There is no set formula for therapy - every session with every client looks different. I find that a lot of people value the therapy space as a container for verbal processing (see an excellent blog post by coach Sam Dylan Finch about this here), and my level of directiveness will depend on what you bring in each session. I am neither a "nod and smile, mhmm, how does that make you feel?" therapist nor a "tough love call-you-out" therapist, but I will point out patterns I observe and ask you questions about them, and I will provide active reflection regardless of how much or how little you have to say. 

I have a “style” that is grounded in realism and supports bottom-up processing. In other words, I work by helping you collect all the available information about yourself, others, and a given situation; formulate questions about what information is missing; and access feelings about what you know and don’t know so that we can work toward identification of what’s in your control (and acting on those things) as well as acceptance of what isn’t. Alternatively, a top-down approach starts with an assumption, such as that you should be able to XYZ. As tempting as this shortcut is, I find that going bottom-up - the scenic route - gives us much-needed pit stops at major self-discoveries like your values, past behaviors that did and didn’t work for you, what comprises your authentic self vs. the mask you may have developed for others’ benefit, and so much more. You are inherently deserving of all of that information - it’s yours. Let’s go find it.  

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In true ADHD fashion, I tend to weave spontaneously-created, sometimes odd metaphors, activist quotes, TikToks, and other timely resources into sessions or think of my clients when consuming media outside of our time together that can be helpful to use as an exploratory springboard, and I invite you to do the same!

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