The choice to enter counseling often comes after some thought and consideration. Thinking about change and taking action to find support demonstrate important steps a person is already taking toward change. Whether a difficult life event has occurred, or over time you have wanted to improve certain areas of your life, even coming to visit a website is a step along the way to healing. Mary works with this process of change - how you think, what you feel, and what will assist you in taking the next steps toward health. Compassion, empathy, respect, genuineness are cornerstones Mary uses to forming a strong therapeutic connection that will be the platform from which changes can be made. Change can be challenging, but can also be fun, spirited, and a journey worth taking.
Mary’s work includes a strong focus on interpersonal relationships. Our sense of purpose and meaning often come from our connections with loved ones. Advances in neurobiology have shown how we are wired for connection, and how connection supports our strength and resiliency. Our ability to manage our relationships with others at home, work, school, and other activities is important to our experience of connection, belonging, and having a role or place in the world. Mary offers a variety of supportive options for individuals, couples, and families as described below.
Family and Couple Counseling
Mary’s training and experience allows for both educational and interactive couple and family work. Couples and families can work with immediate emotions and experience in the moment, take home skills to practice, view themselves to target conflict resolution skills through video playback, and more. Mary works with each couple and family to deepen connection, improve communication, and heal from past events. Mary has training in Systemic Therapy, Emotion-Focused Therapy, and Gottman Method Couples Therapy.
Groups and Classes
Mary offers educational groups and process groups. Educational groups for couples are often based on Gottman’s work on the Sound Relationship House. These groups are intended to assist clients in building on strengths in their relationships and developing new skills in areas that need improvement or support. Gottman's Sound Relationship House uses seven areas that are helpful in creating satisfying relationships: Building Love Maps, Sharing Fondness & Admiration, Turning Towards Each Other, Gaining The Positive Perspective. Managing Conflict (solvable and unsolvable problems), Making Life Dreams and Aspirations Come True, and Creating Shared Meaning.
Educational groups for individuals include DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy), Shame and Resilience, and other topics.
Process-oriented group therapy for individuals and for couples provides a place where people learn and gain insight into their interpersonal responses from feedback and support from each other.
Brief Relationship Check-Up
The Relationship Check-Up is an assessment followed with a feedback session. The assessment incudes a series of forms each partner completes, which are then scored and findings are summarized. A follow-up feedback session is offered to give the results, which include areas of strength and areas for improvement in the relationship. Couples may then determine to work at home on their own, attend an educational and experiential class or workshop, or attend couples counseling sessions with a therapist. A resource list is provided at the time of the feedback session that includes books and materials that may be useful to work at home and information on upcoming classes and workshops for couples in the local area.
Everyone has people in their lives that are gay, lesbian or transgender or bisexual. They may not want to admit it, but I guarantee they know somebody. - Billie Jean King
Managing coming out, intern and external homophobia, transphobia, and cultural heterosexism are challenging tasks. Families can become disconnected through shame, misunderstanding, and painful beliefs. Navigating parenting, keeping committed partnerships strong and healthy, maintaining hope and balance in one's life are challenging tasks in a world where changes in attitudes, acceptance, and equality are occurring across the world in ways that seems to occur with one step forward and two steps back.
Therapuetic assistance can be considerably valuable in helping you find your way through these waters - whether you are a couple, a family, a family member, or an individual looking for support or a safe place to sort through thoughts and feelings.
Concurrent with her studies in Marriage and Family Therapy, Mary received a specialization in LGBT family systems. She works with individuals, couples, and families to meet the challenges LBGTIQ people face in today’s
Mary works from a sex-positive framework, which values sexuality as a natural, normal, and rich source of pleasure, comfort, and connection in our lives. Sexual wellness is worthy of exploration and care for its own sake, as well as for all the areas it interconnects and effects our lives as a whole. Sexual, sensuality, erotic and sexual intimacy are important areas of development for individuals and couples. And many people struggle for wholeness and health. In a culture where messages about sex are frequently mixed, spirituality and sexuality, mind and body, are often separated, Mary works to help individuals and couples sort through their sexual development and sexual health concerns to find healing, wholeness, joy, and satisfaction. Working with a board-certified clinical sexologist provides individuals and couples with a professional trained to help with the most intimate sexual health concerns. Mary adds additional training in mental health and relational health to work with the myriad concerns related to sexual health.
Mary has experience and training working with individuals and couples on a range of sexual health issues.
Counseling is available for:
Deepening sexual, sensual, erotic, and emotional intimacy
Relieving pain with intercourse
Working with trauma and grief in regard to sexual health
Desire Concerns (low or high)
Avoidance Concerns
Arousal and Performance Concerns
Orgasm/Ejaculation Concerns
Compulsive sex behavior
Mis-matched sexual desire in couples
Sexual trauma including EMDR treatment (see below)
Healing sexual and emotional intimacy after betrayals or affairs
Anxiety, guilt, intrusive thoughts about sex and/or during sex
Shame related to one's body or sexual concerns
Sexual health when dealing with with disabilities, pain, or chronic illness
Communicating about sex
Building satisfaction and joy in your sex life
Sexual health across the lifespan - aging and other concerns
Increasing variety and finding new paths to intimacy and desire
Maintaining sexual connection in long-term relationships
Gender and sexual orientation
Support for alternative, consensual adult sexual practices and lifestyles; KAP professional
And other sex-related issues and concerns
EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing. EMDR uses an information processing therapy used to work with trauma - from catastrophic traumatic events to smaller, chronic, frequent traumas - all of which can shape our beliefs about ourselves and our world, our emotional reactions, and our physical sensations. EMDR has show efficacy in working with the myriad mental health concerns related to trauma, and works by accessing the natural process in our brains to resolve past experiences. EMDR uses bi-lateral stimulation (one side of our body to the other - right and left) with visual, tactile, or auditory stimulation, while attending to three areas of our experiences: past events, current situations, and future behaviors. EMDR combines bi-lateral stimulation with elements of psychodynamic, cognitive behavioral, interpersonal, experiential, and body-centered therapies for a comprehensive and integrated treatment approach.
Whatever the internal processes during MI [Motivational Interviewing] that inspire change and strengthen commitment, they surely involve the whole brain including our capacity for love, hope, interest, compassion, and joy. - William R. Miller, MINT Bulletin, 2009, Vol. 15 No. 1
Mary uses Motivational Interviewing in her work with individuals, couples, and families to assist with behavior changes, to help resolve ambivalence, and to work through challenges that arise in the course of the change process. Motivational Interviewing is a client-centered directive style and spirit that has been show to assist people in the change process by building on and using each person’s values, dreams, and goals. Motivational Interviewing is fundamentally respectful, collaborative, affirming of each person’s unique strengths and abilities toward the goal of building stronger desire and ability to make changes.
In clinical trials, Motivational Interviewing has been shown to be highly effective in helping individuals start and maintain changes in their lives.
In addition to using Motivational Interviewing clinically, Mary offers professional training for helping professionals (counselors, social workers, parole/probation officers, medical and dental professionals, and others) who would like to learn Motivational Interviewing. Basic skills, advanced training, using Motivational Interviewing in the supervision process, tape coding and feedback, and other training services for professionals are available. Trainings will be announced on this website and through email announcements for those interested. If you would like to be on the list to receive emails about upcoming trainings, let us know. Mary can also provide individual and group trainings as requested for practitioners and organizations.
While it is not at all incompatible with giving advice or teaching new skills, a motivational interviewing method places its main bets on the person’s own resourcefulness. The overall view is that confidence (like the importance aspect of motivation for change) is not something to be imposed but, rather, is evoked from the person, literally called (voiced) forth in the person’s own words and ideas… finding hope and confidence for change is a collaborative process in which the counselor is privileged to participate. - William R. Miller and Stephen Rollnick, Motivational Interviewing, 2nd edition.
We find that people's beliefs about their efficacy affect the sorts of choices they make in very significant ways. In particular, it affects their levels of motivation and perseverance in the face of obstacles. Most success requires persistent effort, so low self-efficacy becomes a self-limiting process. In order to succeed, people need a sense of self-efficacy, strung together with resilience to meet the inevitable obstacles and inequities of life. -Albert Bandura
