Jennifer is a Licensed Social Work Associate Clinician and Mental Health Professional in the State of Washington. She specializes in working with children, teens, adults, and families impacted by adoption, foster care, trauma, attachment challenges, and grief. She is a First Mom of a teenage daughter in an open adoption. Her passion, both professionally and personally, is to bring hope and healing to the adoption community, through providing attachment focused therapy services to those in the adoption constellation.
She currently has a private practice as an adoption and trauma therapist in Yakima, WA. She also offers teleconference consultation and (first/adoptive) parent coaching to those who live out of the area, as a way to help remove the barriers associated with accessing truly adoption-competent (or as we like to say, Adoption Savvy) services. She strongly believes each person has the ability to become their best self when given opportunities to move through the roadblocks that keep us stuck.
She graduated from the University of Washington with my Bachelors in Social Welfare in 2014 where she spent time in Child Welfare and later as a Social Worker at an adoption agency. In 2017, she graduated with her Masters of Arts in Clinical Social Work from Columbia University and returned to the Pacific Northwest to continue to support adoptive families, birth parents, and adoptees. In 2019 she was certified in Attachment and Trauma Focused Therapy (ATFT), with Deborah Gray and has had the honored opportunity to train other professionals alongside her as she helps other clinicians become adoption savvy. I am currently completing a Post-Graduate Certificate in Relationally Focused Psychodynamic Theory (RFPT) through the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology.
She utilizes Family Systems Theory, Attachment Theory, TF-CBT, ATFT, Sand Tray, RFPT, and Filial Play Therapy, and is trained in the PATCh Program (Parenting Adopted and Traumatized Children), which includes 12-16 weeks of individual attachment and attunement therapy and 6 weeks of group therapy. She works from a strength based, attachment and relational therapeutic approach, believing relationships are key to how we understand and move through the world. It is through breaks in relationship (attachment) where the deepest harm happens, so it is within relationship that our healing must occur. She's passionate about helping parents learn parenting techniques that increase secure attachment with their children so they can be a safe base for their child to explore the world. Each person has strengths we can identify and use as a starting place for growth and change.
