About Your Therapist //
I’m a licensed professional counselor (LPC) and a board-certified dance/movement therapist (BC-DMT) with over 30 years of experience. I have been married for 30 years and have two adult children. I am not a doctor, and I don’t prescribe medication, but I would be glad to refer you to a few with whom I maintain great working relationships. I am also not a psychologist; I’m a psychotherapist. I can screen for various mental health disorders but I cannot perform psychological or academic testing – psychologists can, however. I am certified in trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (TF-CBT) for children and as a trauma-informed therapist. I consider most of us ‘wounded’, especially as we all have experienced the COVID-19 pandemic separately, yet together.
I am a 1987 graduate of Temple University, receiving a BA in Psychology with honors. I am also a 1989 graduate of Hahnemann University Graduate School’s Master of Creative Arts in Therapy (MCAT) program (currently Drexel University’s Master of Dance/Movement Therapy and Counseling program), receiving the Thesis Award for clinical research. I have held clinical administrative positions at Interac, Inc. in Philadelphia and at Family Service Association of Bucks County.
I’m currently an adjunct faculty member at Drexel University and a lecturer for Gwynedd Mercy University’s Master of Science in Counseling Psychology program. For eleven years I was a lecturer for Holy Family University’s Master of Counseling Psychology program, where I created the “Introduction to Play Therapy” course curriculum. I have also taught for Sancheti Healthcare Academy in Pune, India.
I enjoy being a professor and offering my knowledge to graduate students studying counseling and dance/movement therapy – it’s my way to give back to the profession that I have loved all of these years. I have worked in school settings, partial hospitalization and residential treatment programs, and interned at the Center for Autism and the VA Hospital in Philadelphia. I have been invited to lecture at University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education and Bryn Mawr School of Social Work, and I have offered workshops for the Bucks County Bar Association, just to name a few. During my career, I have volunteered for my local and national professional organization, the American Dance Therapy Association (www.paadta.com and www.adta.org).
It is a passion of mine. When I was in high school in NE Philly, I was the choreographer of the school musicals, and I worked with the special education students, creating an adaptive gym routine to make physical education fun and successful. A teacher noticed my interest in helping others and knew my dance leadership skills; she introduced me to the field of dance/movement therapy and for this, I am forever grateful.
My clients and the clients of students and clinicians that I have supervised have been as varied as one can imagine, each with their own unique story to tell. At the end of each semester, I send this to my students, because I believe it and feel it with all of my heart and mind:
So what does it take to be a good counselor?
"First of all, you must love doing counseling. You must believe in your own creative power to put things together with vision and insight. You must have confidence in your understanding of the people involved. You must love the drama and be fascinated with the sudden revelations that bring enormous changes. You must stand for truth and be able to question everything, down to everyone’s secret motives. You must love humanity and be willing to empathize with all who suffer - to get inside their skin and see the world through their eyes. You must dream and follow your imagination wherever it leads. You must love humor, for it restores balance. You must delight in language and all its nuances. You must be sensitive to life’s contradictions and always suspicious that things aren’t what they seem. You must be brave and audacious and tolerate ridicule. And most of all, you must love to provide the spark that bridges the gap between limitations and possibilities, knowing that there’s a great deal to human beings, so a great deal can be made out of them. They don’t have to stay the way they are now, and we don’t have to see them only as they are now, but also as they might become."
- from Cloe Madanes, author of “Strategic Family Therapy”
Please refer to my Services page for more details about what I can offer you.