The Part of My Story Most People Don’t Know

From youth empowerment to adult healing — and the quiet throughline that connects it all

When people meet me now — as a mental health therapist in Pittsburgh, specializing in adult healing and trauma resolution — they often assume this was always my path. What many don’t know is that my professional life began somewhere entirely different: in the world of youth empowerment and global leadership development.

For more than a decade, that world was my home.

I helped found a youth nonprofit in my early twenties, spent years on the road working in youth empowerment across twenty states and ten countries, and supported humanitarian programs through Questscope across the Middle East. My days were filled with young people — listening to their stories, witnessing their resilience, and learning how profoundly environments shape identity long before adulthood begins.

Those years formed me.

They taught me that resilience is learned, and that healing is never an individual act. Every young person I worked with carried the emotional imprint of the adults in their lives. Their confidence, their fears, their sense of belonging — so much of it reflected the worlds they grew up inside. For a long time, I didn’t fully understand the significance of that pattern.

Then came 2020.

When schools shut down and counseling children through a screen became the new normal, I expected the kids to struggle. And don’t get me wrong, they did but what surprised me was how much the adults were unraveling. Parents broke down on phone calls, overwhelmed by the weight of fear, work, caregiving, and uncertainty. Their stress rippled outward, and children absorbed it quietly. It became impossible to ignore:

Children will be okay when the adults around them are okay.

That realization changed the direction of my life. I stepped away from school counseling, pursued advanced training in perinatal and adult mental health, and made a decision that still surprises some people: I shifted my clinical focus away from children so I could support the adults shaping them.

My work now is still about youth — just indirectly.

It’s about helping adults reparent themselves, heal long-held emotional imprints, and learn to respond more steadily to stress and emotion so their children don’t have to inherit unprocessed fear, stress, or grief. It’s about breaking cycles quietly, compassionately, and intentionally. And it’s about understanding that every adult who heals sends ripples into families, communities, and future generations.

Over time, my clinical training deepened in trauma-informed and brain-based approaches — in particular a therapeutic tool that allows healing to occur without requiring people to relive every painful detail. What began as a desire to better support perinatal mental health expanded into work with adults navigating anxiety, grief, medical trauma, chronic stress, identity shifts, and the quiet overwhelm of modern life.

If there’s a thread connecting my past to my present, it’s this: Healing doesn’t stop with the person doing the work. Healing ripples forward.

Where This Work Is Taking Me

Over time, my curiosity shifted from whether healing was possible to how it happens — how emotional reactions soften over time, how memories can change without being relived, how memories soften without being relived, and how clinicians can facilitate change without asking people to suffer their way through it.

That curiosity led me into advanced training in Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART), a modality that aligns deeply with how I understand healing: efficient, respectful, and grounded in the brain’s natural capacity to reorganize and recover.

In the coming weeks, this work will expand beyond my own practice and into training other clinicians — not as a departure from my past, but as a continuation of it. Teaching, mentoring, and empowering others to do this work well has always been part of who I am.

The setting has changed. The mission hasn’t.

Healing still ripples forward.