Helping You Understand the Patterns That Shape Your Life

Seeking therapy is a meaningful step. Finding the right therapist is an important part of that process.

This page is intended to give you a clear sense of who I am, how I approach therapy, and what it may be like to work together.

At the center of my work is a simple belief: people are capable of growth, healing, and meaningful change. But meaningful change requires more than insight alone. It requires space to understand the patterns, beliefs, experiences, and survival strategies that have shaped how you think, feel, relate, protect yourself, and move through the world.

Many of the patterns we carry developed for understandable reasons. They may have helped us cope, adapt, succeed, or survive. Over time, however, those same patterns can begin to limit our relationships, confidence, emotional well-being, self-trust, and ability to live fully.

Therapy provides an opportunity to understand those patterns with honesty and compassion, while creating new possibilities for how you want to live.

My Background

I am a Licensed Professional Counselor Associate in South Carolina and hold a PhD in Counseling and a Master’s in Rehabilitation Counseling. I bring more than 20 years of experience across mental health, counseling, rehabilitation, disability services, behavioral health systems, education, training, organizational development, and public service.

Throughout my career, I have worked with individuals from diverse backgrounds navigating complex personal, professional, relational, and life challenges. These experiences have shaped my understanding of the many factors that influence mental health and well-being, including relationships, identity, culture, environment, disability, trauma, grief, life experience, and access to opportunity.

My foundation in rehabilitation counseling continues to shape how I view people and the therapeutic process. Rehabilitation counseling emphasizes strengths, resilience, self-determination, and the belief that people can continue to grow, adapt, and thrive despite obstacles, setbacks, or adversity.

Rather than focusing only on what is wrong, I am interested in understanding what may be standing in the way of the life you want to create.

My Approach to Therapy

My approach is integrative and deeply rooted in humanistic principles.

Integrative means I draw from multiple evidence-based approaches depending on your needs, goals, and circumstances. These may include Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Motivational Interviewing, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Solution-Focused Therapy, mindfulness-based interventions, strengths-based approaches, and person-centered techniques.

I do not believe therapy should force every client into the same model. Therapy should be responsive to the person, the pattern, and the work that needs to be done.

Humanistic means I believe each person has inherent worth and the capacity for growth. I view therapy as a collaborative process that supports greater self-awareness, emotional regulation, self-determination, and alignment with your values.

While therapy can help reduce symptoms such as anxiety, stress, grief, and emotional overwhelm, meaningful change often requires looking beneath the symptoms to better understand the patterns that keep repeating.

Together, we may explore:

• Longstanding beliefs about yourself and others
• Relationship dynamics and attachment patterns
• Emotional responses and coping strategies
• Experiences of loss, transition, trauma, or adversity
• Self-worth, confidence, and identity
• Boundaries, responsibility, and overfunctioning
• Personal values, goals, and aspirations

My goal is not to tell you who you should be.

My goal is to help you better understand yourself so you can make intentional choices about how you want to live.

My Philosophy of Performance Therapy

My work is informed by a specialized approach I call Performance Therapy.

Performance Therapy is not coaching. It is a clinically grounded approach to understanding the relationship between emotional well-being, self-beliefs, identity, relationships, life experience, behavior patterns, and daily functioning.

Many people are able to perform well on the outside while feeling anxious, disconnected, overwhelmed, depleted, or uncertain internally. They may be successful, responsible, capable, and relied upon by others, while privately struggling with grief, pressure, self-doubt, emotional exhaustion, or the cost of holding everything together.

Performance Therapy focuses on the gap between functioning and truly living.

Whether you are navigating anxiety, grief, workplace stress, relationship challenges, leadership responsibilities, identity shifts, or a major life transition, these experiences can affect confidence, decision-making, emotional regulation, self-trust, and overall well-being.

The goal is not perfection.

The goal is to help you function in ways that are more intentional, authentic, regulated, and aligned with your values.

Culture, Identity, and Lived Experience

Our experiences do not occur in isolation. They are shaped by the broader social, cultural, historical, relational, and systemic contexts in which we live.

As a Black woman, I understand the importance of having spaces where identity, culture, responsibility, pressure, and lived experience can be explored openly and without judgment.

While I welcome adults from diverse backgrounds, I am especially attuned to the experiences of women — particularly Black women — who have spent much of their lives carrying significant responsibilities while navigating the expectations of family, work, relationships, community, and society.

My goal is to create a therapeutic environment where clients feel respected, supported, and able to show up with honesty, complexity, and fullness.

Why ALIVE?

The name ALIVE reflects my belief that therapy is about more than symptom reduction.

It is about reconnecting with yourself.

It is about understanding the patterns that shape your life, addressing the barriers that stand in your way, and creating space for greater clarity, regulation, self-trust, and choice.

It is about moving beyond survival and toward a life that feels more intentional, meaningful, and fully lived.

More life. Less survival.