About Emma

Hi, I’m Emma. You might be reading this and wondering if I’m qualified to help you. I could tell you more about my credentials - how I got my Master’s and Ph.D. at Southern Illinois University, followed by an internship and postdoctoral fellowship at Vanderbilt University. Or how I’ve been doing therapy with folks for a decade. I have all of the fancy letters behind my name and I can even give you my Tennessee psychology license number. But none of that really tells you what’s important. What it’s like to sit in a room with me and whether I can help. So let’s chat about that.

Many of my clients are bright and motivated people who are tired of stress and trauma stealing their lives. You worked your whole life to outrun your trauma. You've built a successful career, you’ve created an amazing family, but you continue to feel stuck. Maybe you can pinpoint the moment when your life changed. The sexual assault. The devastating medical diagnosis. The miscarriage. Or maybe it felt like death by a thousand paper cuts. Parents that didn’t understand you. The kid that never got invited to the neighborhood birthday parties. A sense of loneliness that follows you around day by day. These moments have stolen your vibrance and replaced it with a hollow feeling you can’t shake. 

There’s a lot of grief with trauma - the life you could have had, the person you would have been. You want to move on but you’re stuck reliving painful memories. I help people make peace with the life they have been given, instead of the life they expected to have.  A lot of my therapeutic work involves sitting together as we talk (or write) through the scary thoughts and memories riding shotgun in your mind. The ones that follow you around every day. I use a narrative approach, which is a fancy way of saying that together we explore your life story. Who you are, how you got here, and how to move forward. This can be informal or structured depending on what you need. This typically involves flexing your self compassion muscles. Our work together will begin to unravel the criticism and perfectionism that dominate our culture, and re-learn how to be human instead.

I’m passionate about this work because I’ve seen people revolutionize their life with a commitment to change and the scary decision to embrace their vulnerability. I’m good at this work because I’m empathetic and nonjudgmental. But more than that, I’m honest, even when it’s hard. I’ll challenge you to engage with your life again. I’ll ask you to think about the hard stuff and trust that you’ll make it through the other side. I’ll also probably mention an episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch or some equally nerdy fantasy book at least once a month. 

If you’re ready to stop living in fear, to let go of the shame that has taken hold of your life - reach out and we can find a new, better way together.

Emma specializes in:

• Complex Trauma

• Sexual Assault and Childhood Sexual Abuse

• Anxiety & stress

• Medical Trauma

• Women’s Health