Approach
Finding a good match for your wellness & healing journey
Hiring someone to help you explore some of the most personal and unchartered corners of your heart and mind can be overwhelming, challenging, and vulnerable. It is important to feel assured that your helper is professional, skillful, ethical, and committed to understanding and seeing YOU instead of making assumptions or applying the latest cookie-cutter solutions or methods.
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 mental and emotional health and well-being, including actively working to decolonize my practice and thinking. I do this work (and my life) through a healing-justice, trauma-informed, and anti-oppression lens. I am dedicated to providing compassionate, confidential, and ethical services. I offer an authentic and down-to-earth style wrapped with genuine interest, compassion, acceptance, and a varied skill set.
I am equipped to draw from a breadth of genres, training, education, and personal and professional experiences and incorporate a relational, strengths-based, and process-oriented 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, critical race theory, emotionally focused and attachment theories, non-violent conflict resolution practices, cognitive behavioral and mindfulness acceptance theories, inner child healing, boundary strategies, visualization, neuro-psychology, family systems, radical acceptance, discernment, and values and goal-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, authors, and trainers.
In addition to offering services for relationships, individuals, and groups, Irene trains other mental health professionals and organizations. Specific training areas include trauma healing, relationship coaching, LGBTQ+ issues, mindfulness, positive psychology, life coaching, compassion fatigue, burnout, moral injury, vicarious trauma, emotional regulation, gender and sexual identity, kink/BDSM, mediation, conflict resolution, holistic wellness, anti-racism, Whiteness, and white supremacy, and decolonizing mental health.
Examples of Organizations Irene has Trained: Regions Hospital, St. Paul, MN; Denver Health Medical Center, Denver, Colorado; Anatomy Bequest Program, University of Minnesota; MN LGBTQ+ Therapists’ Network; Headway Emotional Health Services, Twin Cities; The University of Minnesota Advising Program: Office of Undergraduate Education; Telling Queer History, Twin Cities; BECAUSE Conference, St. Paul; The University of Minnesota Department of Earth Sciences; Travis County Texas Prosecutor’s Office, Austin Tx; Way to Grow, MN; State Conference for Headway MN; MN Coalition of Sexual Abuse Programs; MN Department of Corrections; Anti-racism Coalition, 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.
CURRENTLY, ALL OF MY SERVICES ARE BEING OFFERED ONLINE | TELEHEALTH.
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.
