Director of GETME
I’m an LCPC — Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor — in Portland, Maine. I assist people with a variety of mental, emotional and behavioral challenges, as well as personal growth, relationship, and career issues. I have provided direct mental health services since 2003, and opened my private practice in 2007. In 2014, I founded GETME to train and supervise other therapists.
I received my master’s degree in Mental Health Counseling from the University of Southern Maine in 2006. My primary mentor there was Reid Stevens, whose humanistic core made a profound impression on me. From the beginning, my practice has been strongly rooted in the Person-Centered tradition.
I later completed a two-year Gestalt Therapy training program at the Gestalt Institute of New England in Somerville, MA. This training was one of the most valuable and powerful experiences of my life, and I feel privileged to have been able to learn from the collective wisdom of therapists Alan Robinson, Kathy Hearn and Lee Geltman.
Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) is an empirically supported integration of Person-Centered Therapy and Gestalt Therapy. I’ve studied EFT with its primary originator, Les Greenberg, along with Serine Warwar, at the Emotion-Focused Clinic at York University in Toronto. I have also studied with Rhonda Goldman through her Emotion-Focused Therapy Institute.
I completed an externship in Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples with Sue Johnson through the Ackerman Institute for the Family (NYC), and Advanced Core Skills in EFT through the New York Center for EFT with George Faller and Debi-Scimeca-Diaz, (NYC).
I studied Gene Gendlin’s Focusing with Ruth Hirsch though the Focusing Institute.
I’ve also studied clinical supervision through Chandler Bay Resources, with Jeri Stevens, Randi Cohen, and Deborah Drew. I’ve done additional supervision training with Stephen Andrew through the University of Southern Maine continuing education program.
I spend several hours a week supervising counseling students and licensed counselors, and I have presented on the subject of emotion-focused supervision to internship site supervisors at USM. Assisting in the formation and training of professional counselors has become a passion.
I served a three-year term on the board of the Maine Mental Health Counselors Association, and I’ve worked as an adjunct professor at the University of Southern Maine in the Counselor Education program.
In 2014, I founded GETME (Gestalt/Experiential Therapy of Maine), to teach other professionals the theories and skills of the humanistic/experiential schools of psychotherapy. GETME now also serves as a community clinic, offering affordable counseling to the general public through GETME’s counseling student interns.
I’m excited to go to the office each day because I love the work I do. Every session is a chance to go a little further, to understand a little more, to help someone make a little more peace with themselves and the world. I couldn’t have asked for a more gratifying career.