About Us

I work in mental health, and I have spent many years inside it. My background runs across clinical psychology, child development, work with people who have physical and mental disabilities, time spent in a prison setting, psychological assessment and diagnosis, and the ongoing work of psychotherapy. For a while I taught at the college level and gave the occasional lecture. What has kept me interested, through all of it, is a fairly simple question: how do everyday people build happier lives? I care about catching mental health problems before they take root, and about helping people put together a way of thinking that leads them to decisions they can live with. For years my guiding line has been "Fostering Human Growth and Development."

The other voice here comes from a different corner of the same world. I am a farmer's wife and the mother of three children, all of whom arrived later in my life. These days I am grandmother to ten. One is in middle school, three are in grade school, one just started kindergarten, three are still preschoolers, and the two youngest are infants. Five boys, five girls. I was born and raised in a rural area and I live in one now, though most of my schooling happened in cities, and I picked up my practical training in psychology in both kinds of places.

The education piece has been long and it has never really stopped. A college degree, then a master's, then a doctorate, followed by a two-year post-doctorate, and plenty of continuing education on top of that. For a time I taught psychology part-time at the local junior college, and I still hold a license to practice as a Ph.D. psychologist in the state where I live. Lately I have wanted to do more with psychology online. When I am not working, I am usually chasing answers to the bigger questions through study and meditation, sitting in on workshops, reading about whatever is new in the field, spending time with my family, and finding one small thing to learn each day.

What I write here grows out of all that. Over time I have arrived at a handful of conclusions about life that strike me as worth passing along. I do not expect anyone to agree with every one of them. I would rather they nudge you into thinking about the thing in question, so that you eventually reach conclusions of your own. That is really the shape of the work itself: in practice, the point is to help a person see something more clearly, and then to step back and let them decide what to do with it.

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