Cozy Couch Counseling
Areas of Specialty
Eating Disorders
Whether you’re looking for support maintaining recovery or just starting to talk about your relationship with food for the first time, I’m here to meet you where you are in your journey and collaborate to come up with realistic recovery goals. Together, we’ll get you back to living the life you want, and break free from the restrictions your eating disorder has placed on you. Eating disorders can make your world feel so small – I’m here to help you reclaim your life and take up space, whatever that looks like for you!
​
Eating disorders are a lot more complex than many people realize, often co-occurring with other mental health struggles. Depression, anxiety, OCD, ADHD, autism, trauma, gender dysphoria, weight stigma, and relationship issues are just a few examples of challenges I’ve seen heavily intertwined with eating disorder symptoms. I pride myself on being well equipped to help you navigate these co-occurring diagnoses and overlapping symptoms to provide you with counseling that is personally tailored to you, your brain, your body, and your lifestyle.
ADHD & Neurodivergence
Listen, if planners, post-it notes, and alarms worked, you wouldn’t be here. And you’re probably beyond tired of hearing neurotypical advice to “fix” your neurodivergent brain. I get it – as someone with a graveyard of half-used-at-most planners in their closet, I’m here to help you understand your ADHD symptoms and work with your brain instead of fighting against it.
​
Did you know that there are six different sub-categories of executive functioning, which means there are six different areas of executive dysfunction? Most neurodivergent people struggle with more than one area, but not all six. That’s why blanket ADHD advice doesn’t always work for you; it won’t always apply to your unique blend of symptoms. I’m here to get to the root of your executive dysfunction and collaboratively come up with strategies that work for your brain specifically. And if your brain likes to change the rules on you just when you feel like you’ve got things figured out, that’s okay too; I love to get creative!
Queer Community
Having to take time during your therapy sessions to explain the concept of gender identities or the systemic barriers to gender affirming care detracts from your time focusing on your own needs and goals. I specialize in working with the queer community and am familiar with these challenging-on-purpose systems, so we can focus our time in sessions exploring your specific identity and experience, without you having to teach your therapist about queerness or queer identities as a whole. You don’t have to educate me about the queer community and you don’t have to speak on behalf of entire identities; with me, you can simply speak to your own experience, and trust that I understand the rest.
​
If you are looking for a letter of support for gender affirming care, I am happy to write one for you after six sessions together.
Clinical Supervision
​​I believe that working with clients with eating disorders and members of the queer community are both areas where our field struggles to sufficiently educate counselors during grad school; in my program at least, classes on eating disorders and queerness were entirely elective. This gap in our standards of education is, in my opinion, unacceptable. These are two highly vulnerable populations; eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any diagnosis in the DSM-V, and research consistently demonstrates that queer people – particularly queer youth – are significantly more likely to experience mental health issues than their heterosexual peers. This discrepancy is even higher between trans and nonbinary individuals and their cisgender peers. If you are a counselor struggling to support clients within these populations, it is not your fault. This is a systemic issue that unfortunately falls on us as individual counselors to remedy for ourselves.
​
To do my part to close that educational gap, I provide clinical supervision to LPCCs pursuing licensure and consultation to LPCCs or LPCs seeking more information about treating eating disorders, supporting genderqueer clients, working with neurodivergence, teens, or signing letters of support. I have also given introductory presentations on these topics to colleagues, and am always looking for opportunities to improve our overall education in these areas to better serve members of these vulnerable communities.