Rene, LSWAIC, MeD
I'm drawn to the parts of people that don't fit neatly into conventional frameworks, and to the work of making sense of ourselves, our relationships, and the broader contexts we move through. My approach is relational, attachment-focused, and attuned to the ways people create safety and meaning.
My roots in mental health are with people experiencing active trauma or crisis, with a focus on children and adolescents and the adults who support them. I've worked with folks moving through multiple systems and settings—educational, legal, residential, hospital, and community-based.
My practice is play-based and psychodynamic. Work with early adolescents offers a useful picture of what this looks like in practice. A session with a 10-year-old might start with conversation about social struggles, then move into client-led expressive play, imagining inner and outer conflicts to find their own integral solutions, to understand themselves, feel understood, and to let unfinished emotional experiences reach resolution. Throughout, they might make big movements, a creative mess, or settle into music or art as they regulate through the process.
With adults, or more cognitive folks, sessions are conversational, but that conversation can coexist with making things, moving, or welcoming tangents about ideas and interests. Creativity might run alongside talk as a way to stay grounded, whether through heavy emotional content or the ordinary experience of two people in a relational space that is expected to be quite serious, and often is. Or it might become the primary mode, more true to how kids play naturally: a way of finding a feeling or telling a story that is sometimes just more accurately expressed without literal language. In IFS, for example, a client might draw, sculpt, or diagram their parts rather than just describing them.
Formally, I draw from Child-Centered Play Therapy (CCPT) and arts-based practices; Internal Family Systems (IFS) and Structural Dissociation frameworks; narrative and psychodynamic methods; ERP (exposure and response prevention, for OCD and anxiety); and somatic, emotion-focused orientations like Somatic Experiencing and AEDP that treat the real relationship between client and therapist as the ground for working through difficult experiences.
Special Areas of Interest
Attachment disruptions (past or present)
OCD and intrusive patterns
Anger and aggression in children and adolescents
Neurodivergence
DID/OSDD and multiplicity
Religious ruptures
Diverse gender and queer experiences
I’m Best For People Who:
communicate through humor, detachment, or intensity
prefer experiential work over directive or manualized approaches
want a therapist comfortable with nuance, contradiction, and nonlinear change
want to work with someone who is, at baseline, energetic and chatty
are queer, trans, curious, or otherwise questioning prescriptive social models
Supervision: Practicing under the supervision of Mackenzie Dunham and Mindy Davis.
Insurance and Rates
Sliding Scale Info: case by case
Insurance Rene takes: Aetna, CHPW, Cigna, Coordinated Care, Kaiser, Moda, Molina, Premera, Providence PPO, Optum, Regence BCBS, RGA, UMR, UnitedHealth Care (commercial -not medicaid)
