Who I Work with in Maryland

Adoptive and Foster Parents

If you adopted through a Maryland agency or private adoption, you might be managing behaviors that other parents don’t deal with:

• Your eight-year-old punches holes in the wall when you say no

• Your teenager steals money from your wallet and lies about it while looking you directly in the eye

• Your five-year-old hoards food in their bedroom even though meals are predictable and plentiful

You've tried three different therapists who gave you advice about "natural consequences" and "staying calm" – strategies that assume your child's brain works like a neurotypical child's brain. It doesn’t, because early trauma changed how their nervous system developed.

The work we do focuses on your nervous system first. When your child screams at you for two hours because you asked them to put their shoes on, your body needs to stay regulated enough to hold the boundary without screaming back or checking out.

We use modalities like EMDR, Accelerated Resolution Therapy, and Brainspotting to process your own trauma response: the secondary trauma from parenting a child who sometimes looks at you with genuine hatred, the grief of realizing this won't ever look like the adoption story you imagined, and the anger that surfaces when people say "all kids do that" about behaviors that are destroying your family.

After our work together, you’ll be able to sit through an IEP meeting and clearly explain what your child needs without your throat closing up. You can tell your spouse "I need a break" without the guilt that used to keep you parenting 24/7. You can make hard decisions about respite care or residential treatment while staying connected to your child, instead of swinging between clinging and fantasizing about disruption.

I spent nine years working in child welfare and adoption before private practice, and I'm C.A.S.E. certified in adoption competency. I know what adoption trauma looks like because I've sat with hundreds of families living it.

Learn more about therapy for adoptive and foster parents here.

Healthcare Workers and Families

Maryland has Johns Hopkins, University of Maryland Medical Center, and NIH: some of the best hospitals in the country. If you work at one of these institutions, you’re held to a standard where mistakes can end a career or a life.

For healthcare workers: Maybe you gave the wrong medication dose and caught it before harm happened, but now you check every order four times and still don't trust yourself. Maybe a patient coded and died, and you physically cannot walk past that room without your heart rate spiking. Maybe you're being sued for a complication that wasn't your fault, but your nervous system doesn't understand fault; it just knows you're being investigated and your license is at risk.

The trauma response looks like pulling into the Johns Hopkins parking garage and feeling your chest tighten before you even clock in. It looks like lying awake at 2am replaying the case, searching for what you missed. It looks like snapping at your kids when they interrupt you because your nervous system is already maxed out from being constantly on edge at work.

We use trauma processing methods to separate the event from your identity as a clinician. Your body learns that you can think about what happened without going into fight-or-flight and you can make clinical decisions based on your training instead of from a place of fear and anxiety.

After trauma therapy, you’ll be able to walk into the hospital and your shoulders stay down instead of creeping up to your ears. You make a judgment call and trust it instead of second-guessing for six hours. You come home and actually be present with your family instead of still running through scenarios in your head.

Learn more about healthcare worker trauma, burnout, and compassion fatigue here.

For Families Grieving a Diagnosis or a Death

The trauma response shows up as panic every time your phone rings with a Maryland area code because it might be the hospital. It shows up as an inability to sleep more than two hours at a time because you're listening for changes in breathing. It shows up as rage at the medical team who used words like “incompatible with life” while your child was still alive.

We work on processing the specific traumatic moments: watching the seizure happen, hearing the diagnosis, making the decision to stop treatment, so that your nervous system can move out of emergency mode.

Sometimes grief gets complicated by trauma: 

• Your brother died by suicide and you found him

• Your mother died suddenly and you didn't get to say goodbye, and now you’re stuck on the fact that your last conversation was an argument about something trivial

• Your spouse died after a long illness and you watched them suffer, and now you can’t remember them before they were sick

Regular grief counseling focuses on processing feelings and finding meaning. But if trauma is involved, your nervous system is frozen in the moment of the event. You can't grieve because you're still in emergency mode.

The trauma work comes first. We’ll use EMDR, Accelerated Resolution Therapy, or Brainspotting to process the traumatic parts: the image of finding them, the sounds from the hospital room, the moment you realized they were gone. 

Once your body processes those pieces, you can fully and properly grieve instead of just white-knuckling through each day.

After treatment, you can look at photos without dissociating. You can talk about them without your throat closing. You can be around their belongings without panic. The grief is still there, but you're not stuck in the trauma response anymore.

Learn more about grief counseling here.