ABOUT
I am a holder of a Marriage and Family Therapist - Associate** license in the state of Texas. This means that I had to pass a test, graduate with a master’s degree that included a couple hundred of hours of counseling, and have an experienced supervisor that I meet with every week. This also means I am beholden to professional standards of ethics and integrity in our therapeutic relationship.
I am a graduate from UMHB.
I graduated from University of Mary Hardin-Baylor with my Master’s in Marriage, Family, and Child counseling. I also have a Bachelor’s in Political Science from Seattle Pacific University, and formerly was a Teach for America teacher in Mississippi. I was briefly a dating coach specifically for men in tech, but then I realized that all discussions on dating became therapy sessions, so I pivoted to therapy instead.
WhY would an individual see a marriage and family therapist?
Marriage and family therapists (MFTs) don’t just see couples and families. MFTs consider the individual through the perspective of Systems Theory. Systems Theory has its roots in biology and posits that we are a part of the systems we seek to observe and we view things necessarily from a subjective perspective - regardless of how objective we may attempt to be.
The goal is understanding of how we impact systems and how those systems impact us. From this understanding we can seek to make decisions with more agency.
In the therapy room that might look like coming to understand the familial patterns that led you to believe your only worth is in productivity, or it might look like discerning the difference between messages you’ve been given about yourself (“You should be smarter, stronger, richer…”) and what you actually want (to crochet while watching WrestleMania).
Why do you call your practice Waveform Counseling?
I had a stint of audio editing work, and it was amazing to see how each person’s voice looked different. Each is a sort of signature. When combined and laid over the top of each other they create fascinating patterns that are unique to those voices and that conversation.
Waves in general are an excellent symbol for therapy based on Systems Theory: Everything we do impacts our entire system, just like dropping a stone in water changes the entire surface.
Even light waves offer an interesting therapeutic metaphor: Both a particle and a wave, we can observe light but still don’t completely understand it, yet we can work with it and measure how it impacts its environment. Light operates as though it is greater than the sum of its parts. While we can describe it, it still retains its mystery.
This is similar to therapy: there will always be mysterious parts of the psyche, and while we can describe ourselves and learn to work with our tendencies, we will always be able to surprise ourselves, too. We retain our mystery even as we learn about how we function.