Growing up with parents who were health care providers – my father was a surgeon and my mother a nurse – I began acting on a drive to be of help to others starting in high school when I became a “candy striper,” wearing the red-and-white striped pinafore and rolling the snack cart into patient’s rooms with a smile. In college I was a Big Sister, Chairperson of the Interracial Concerns Committee, and co-founder of a women’s “empowerment” group. After graduating, I spent several years working as a journalist in Spain and New York before realizing my heart was in the volunteer work I was doing with the homeless and people with HIV/AIDS at the height of that epidemic. I returned to school, got a Masters in Social Work, and – thanks to a combination of family history, personal experience, and the recognition that addiction underlies many physical and mental health woes – began focusing on treating substance use and posttraumatic stress disorders (which often co-occur).
After moving to Durham, I served as Clinical Director in an outpatient substance abuse program and then as an associate in an Employee Assistance Program before pursuing full-time private practice. I work with individuals and couples and have led both long- and short-term psychoeducational groups. Over the years I have given numerous presentations for clinicians about Motivational Interviewing, CBT and DBT for substance use disorders, EMDR treatment for PTSD, and the ethics guiding health and mental health response in disasters. I am a Critical Incident responder and served for 13 years as a Red Cross volunteer and instructor.
In a non-clinical vein, I enjoy the gift of dance given to Durham each summer by the American Dance Festival and have coordinated their post-performance cast parties in local homes for the past 15 years. In the past I was an early board member of the Ellerbee Creek Watershed Association and a Master Gardener with an interest in promoting the preservation of native plant species and ecosystems.
In 2011 I was honored to be named “Social Worker of the Year” by my colleagues in the North Carolina Society for Clinical Social Work. They cited my contributions to substance abuse treatment and education as well as to disaster relief as reasons for this recognition. While helping others prevail is reward enough to me, I am very grateful for their respect.
I received my AB from Dartmouth College and my MSSW from Columbia University. These educational opportunities left me with a love for timeless works of literature, philosophy, and psychology that I found are not so difficult or inscrutable as I had expected. SIMPLE’s discussion materials will draw from my favorite gleanings from these resources, pared down into understandable and personally applicable forms.