My Path to Practicing an Integrative Approach
Healing, to me, is both art and discipline -
a sacred process of remembering what was never truly lost.
For nearly three decades, I’ve walked alongside adults healing from the wounds and pain that everyday life can deliver to complex developmental trauma, dissociative disorders, and the lingering effects of chronic stress. My early career was rooted in the frameworks of conventional psychotherapy and cognitive behavioral therapy. As a new graduate providing Employee Assistance Program (EAP) services, these methods served as the foundation I relied on.
In 2002, I began my chapter in private practice and soon discovered the transformative potential of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). Working intensively with EMDR clients and in consultation, I witnessed trauma that had been trapped in the body begin to loosen its grip. The effectiveness and structure of EMDR became central to my work for over 15 years. With Omaha’s seasoned EMDR community supporting me, I obtained EMDR certification, served as an EMDRIA Regional Coordinator, and became an EMDRIA Approved Consultant.
In 2006, I joined the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD), knowing I needed to deepen my understanding of dissociation and its treatment, as well as to find a like-minded, professional community. ISSTD continues to represent the gold standard of care for this vulnerable population.
As my experience grew, a psychodynamic orientation informed by structural dissociation, ego‑state theory, and adaptive information processing began to shape how I understood what I was seeing in my private practice. As more clients presented with dissociative experiences and complex ways of being, it became clear that assessing for dissociation had to be a consistent part of my clinical process. The more I screened for it, the more I recognized its presence, often hidden beneath symptoms long misattributed to anxiety, depression, or personality style.
These realizations gave me an even clearer view of how exquisitely the mind and body organize to survive overwhelming experience, and how safety, relationship, and curiosity begin to transform it.
Discovering CRM™
In 2019, I completed the Comprehensive Resource Model™ (CRM) basic training and learned its foundational resourcing layers. The experience was profound: my own nervous system and BE-ing came into a new felt sense of home. The only similar feeling I’d known was years earlier, when receiving Reiki healing and first coming into connection with having a soul.
CRM offered a clear path of practice, back to that knowing - a way to meet my own humanity through the lens of the soul’s journey. As I received and applied CRM in both personal and professional work, the process of healing unintegrated pain and reclaiming heart‑centered knowing revealed itself again and again, both in myself and in my clients.
Over the years, I have participated in numerous CRM-intensive trainings and retreats, continually discovering new depths within the model’s ever‑evolving fractal. My relationship with CRM™ does not have an endpoint; it continues to expand how I inhabit my own life and how I guide others in theirs.
Working with and from the CRM clarified something fundamental for me: I believe we exist on Earth as spiritual beings here to have a human experience. This, I feel, is true for all people, each of us seeking reconnection with our own experience of essence. I would never impose this stance on another and hold deep respect for the personal journey each of us takes to explore the questions of self, Source, God, and Universe.
Integrating Reiki and Acutonics®
As an attuned Usui Reiki Master since 2006, I have carried the gifts of my attunements as an integral part of my own centering and grounding. For many years, I have not used Reiki explicitly in my professional space, I wasn’t sure if or when I would. After developing high blood pressure and arthritis in my right hip, despite living a life committed to well‑being, fitness, nourishment, and rest, I was stunned. I began to re‑examine both my personal and professional choices.
That reflection brought a clear understanding: I had been holding back from stepping fully into the work I’m meant to do, as a helper, healer, and clinician with multiple skills. It also became clear that it was time to end my relationship with insurance‑based work, which had gradually pulled me out of alignment with the heart of my life purpose.
Around that same time, I witnessed my chocolate Labrador, Mabel, receive her first chiropractic adjustment from her veterinarian. At the end of the session, the veterinarian took out an Ohm tuning fork and applied it gently to points along Mabel’s back and neck. I was spellbound watching the subtle but immediate relaxation that followed, and I knew I needed to learn more.
Through that experience, Acutonics found me. In 2025, I completed Level 1 training and will complete Level 2 in March 2026. Integrating Traditional Chinese Medicine with planetary‑tuned tuning forks has already become a natural complement to my client work. The reports I receive after sessions, including stories of ease, unexpected release, and profound shifts at every level, continue to amaze and humble me.
My Integrative Philosophy
Bringing these modalities together - CRM™, Reiki, and Acutonics® - has given form to what I now understand as multidimensional healing: the meeting point of psychology, neurobiology, energy, and vibration. Each session is a collaboration that honors the pace and readiness of the nervous system and a trauma-informed orientation to all bodies and the individuals who inhabit them.
I view therapeutic work as a shared process of attunement rather than intervention. Clients bring an innate wisdom of their own lived experience; my role is to offer the lens, the tools, and the presence that allow what has been held in protection to find safety, expression, and integration.
This approach does not treat symptoms in isolation. It attends to the layers of human experience, the physiology of survival, the emotional language of the body, and the quieter dimension of meaning and purpose. Healing unfolds as safety deepens and truth is met with connection and compassion.
After nearly thirty years, I continue to be moved by the courage of those who enter this work. Every encounter reaffirms that wholeness is never lost; it waits beneath adaptation and defense, ready to re‑emerge when met with patience, respect, and curiosity.
