Amy understands and emphasizes the importance of a safe space of healing and hope while exploring our narrative and underlying assumptions that sometimes drive our view of the world and the people around us.
Maintaining sight of the shore from the sea is key when courageously exploring the parts of us that we may desperately try to keep hidden and avoid. Amy utilizes an honest, direct, and collaborative approach, while gently guiding clients in identifying and beginning to change the ineffective, self-destructive or sabotaging coping strategies and behavioral patterns that no longer serve them, so as to begin to create a healthier and more emotionally balanced you. Amy’s style is grounded in a desire to empower others to try to reach and achieve their goals, and to be brave, while deeply rooted in hope.
Rooted in a Family Systems approach, Amy prides herself in her ability to address relational distress. She helps couples who are struggling to cope with parenting issues, difficulties in blending families, family of origin conflict, infidelity, and separation or divorce (among other issues), while providing tools for more direct communication and effective conflict resolution skills. Developing and maintaining intimacy while increasing emotional awareness within relationships is key to really understanding each partner’s position and developed view of relationships, and their place in them. Amy believes that oftentimes, the way that we define ourselves, our sense of self-worth, and our template for relationships is created and reinforced in childhood and adolescence, and as a result, determines and affects the ways in which we react and respond to our partner, and how we may become triggered.
Amy has experience working with individuals, couples, and families in both a private practice and outpatient behavioral health setting, and has experience with depression, anxiety, loss/grief, trauma, substance abuse disorders, life changes, infidelity, and relational distress. While deeply rooted in a Family Systems approach, Amy also utilizes Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Narrative Therapy, Solution-Focused Therapy, and Mindfulness-Based approaches.
Amy hopes you begin to feel relief, joy, hope, and authentic connection again, or for the first time, and invites you to call or email today to see if she can be the right fit to help create a new path in your life.
“Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen”. -Brene Brown
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•M.S. in Marriage and Family Therapy, Northern Illinois University
•Member of the Illinois Affiliation of Marriage and Family Therapists
•Level 1 Certification in Gottman Method Couples Therapy
