My Approach

Are you in search of a provider who aligns with your values, sees you where you are at, supports where you want to go, and will collaboratively invest in your well-being and personal growth journey?

Hiring someone to help you explore some of the most personal and uncharted corners of your heart and mind can be overwhelming, challenging, scary, confusing, and vulnerable.

It is important to feel assured that your provider is professional, skillful, ethical, experienced, and knowledgeable. It is essential that your provider is committed to understanding and seeing YOU – rather than making assumptions or judgments, or applying the latest cookie-cutter techniques, solutions, or methods.

You deserve a compassionate and experienced provider who will meet you where you are at and support your uniqueness in ways that help you to feel safe, understood, and valued.

You deserve a cheerleader when you need one, a coach to help guide, encourage, and support you in your next steps, a teacher who will offer you perspectives and tools for positive change, and someone who will just sit with you in the messiness and loveliness of your self-examination and self-actualization process.

These are elements of the approach I try my best to offer to the clients, relationships, families, and groups I work with. 

My skills, experiences, teachers, and the values that inform my approach to my work.

I am a seasoned mental health professional, national consultant and educator, group facilitator, trained mediator, and positive psychology wellness and relationship coach.

I stay current with psycho-social issues and developments that impact personal and community mental and emotional health and well-being, and I actively work to decolonize my practice and thinking. I strive to do this self-reflection work (and my life) through a healing-justice, community-oriented, trauma-informed, and anti-oppression lens. I am dedicated to providing compassionate, confidential, and ethical services. I offer an authentic, down-to-earth style, grounded in genuine interest, compassion, acceptance, and a varied skill set. 

I am equipped to draw from a breadth of genres, training, educational, personal, and professional experiences.

I incorporate a relational, strengths-based, process-oriented, healing-justice, and trauma-informed approach. Depending on the client’s needs, my approach may intertwine aspects of mindfulness and stress reduction techniques, somatic awareness, harm reduction care, healing-centered engagement, emotional intelligence theory, intersectional feminism and queer studies, critical race theory, emotionally focused and attachment theories, non-violent conflict resolution practices, cognitive behavioral and mindfulness acceptance theories, inner child healing and joy-sourcing, boundary strategizing, visualization and dreaming, neuropsychology, family systems, radical acceptance and discernment, and values-based self-reflection.

I incorporate the works of Mary Ainsworth, Tara Brach, Charme Davidson, Ellen Bass, The Gottman Institute, Mary Pender Greene, Judith Herman, Murray Bowen, bell hooks, Sue Johnson, Ji-Youn Kim, Bessel van der Kolk, Peter Levine, Gabor Mate, David Grand, Pia Mellody, Resmaa Menakem, Jennifer Mullan, Kristin Nuff, Tema Okun, Vikki Reynolds, Virginia Satir, Sarah Schulman, Arielle Schwartz, Sonya Renee Taylor, adrienne marine brown, Thea Lee, Esther Perel, and Nedra Glover Tawwab, as well as numerous other teachers, including my elders, children, feline companions, the oak tree behind my home, and the weather. 

In addition to offering services to individuals, families, relationships, and groups, I offer and provide training and consultation to other mental health and medical professionals, healers, and community-based service organizations. Specific training areas include trauma healing and wellness, relationship coaching, provider compassion fatigue, burnout, moral injury, secondary and vicarious trauma; sex-positivity, queer, gender, and sexual identity; communication and conflict resolution; Whiteness, white supremacy, and decolonizing mental health, and political trauma stress and fatigue, and building resilience. 

Examples of organizations and agencies I have trained: Regions Hospital, St. Paul, MN; Denver Health Medical Center, CO; Anatomy Bequest Program, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities; MN LGBTQ+ Therapists’ Network state conference; Headway Emotional Health Services, Twin Cities; the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities Advising Program: Office of Undergraduate Education; Telling Queer History, Twin Cities; the BECAUSE Annual Conference, St. Paul; the University of Minnesota Department of Earth Sciences-Twin Cities; Travis County Texas Prosecutor’s Office, Austin Tx; Way to Grow, MN; Seward Child Care Center, Twin Cities; State conference for Headway MN; State conference for United Way, State conference of the MN Psychological Association, the MN Coalition of Sexual Abuse Programs; MN Department of Corrections; Anti-racism Coalition of New York City; MN Coalition of Domestic Violence, Northstar Street Medics, MN; The Family Tree Clinic, Minneapolis, MN; MN Women in Psychology; Touchstone Mental Health Annual Conference, Minneapolis, MN; PFund Foundation of the Upper Midwest, and OutFront MN.

See here for more information about my education, experience, training, and work experience. 

For specific information about who I am and where I come from, see About Irene.

Frequently Asked Questions
To learn about the individual, relationship, family, group, and training services I offer, or to schedule your complimentary 30-minute consultation, contact me.