You’re not alone in feeling confused. Like many, I too, have dealt with the ups and downs in life.

For over forty years, I have listened to and encouraged people to share their concerns in their own words. This approach has allowed me to connect with people to help them find the strategies that work for them.

I discovered my passion for helping people early in my life. I was hospitalized at a young age, and it was at that time that I realized that I wanted to help others to recover, heal and to provide them with strategies that work for them. I believe that the same event can be seen as a marker of misfortune or good luck depending on how it is framed. When we see past experiences through new glasses, we gain the power to rewrite the meaning of our own story. I don’t have the answer for what you may need to change, but you do.

What perhaps you don’t have now is access to the how. Even though you cannot change your history, you can change the way you understand it and thus direct your future differently. Together, you and I can write a new story with a different direction from where you stand today.

My mother and my daughter are both learning disabled. Thus, I also developed a passion for helping people with learning and developmental disabilities. Helping students to understand themselves not as disabled or dumb, but as people who learn differently and need to be taught differently is a specific focus for me. In our language-based world, literacy is considered a mark of intelligence-but this was not always true. In other times, storytelling and survival skills were more valued as signs of intelligence. How many of our children would see themselves differently, if we understood intelligence more broadly? After all, it was Einstein who said that “Everybody is a genius in their own right. If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, that fish will live its whole life believing it’s stupid.”

In recognition that each child is unique and needs individual care and treatment, I conduct assessments, formulate approaches that are easily understood by parents and students, create plans allowing students to cope with their issues and succeed academically. I provide ongoing consultations to parents to help them advocate for their children and to school boards to help them develop the best strategies for each student, based on strengths as well as struggles.

Thus, whether I have been involved in therapy or with an educational assessment, I have always believed in the hopefulness of re-authoring personal stories to promote the change each person is seeking.