My professional life, as a trained social worker, has been devoted to helping vulnerable people and communities work through challenges they face in everyday life. My experiences have taken me in and out of schools, neighborhoods, homes, and other environments, removing barriers to a student, a family’s and sometimes a community’s success. Among the many skills I have sharpened in my work and feel are important to this role, as a therapist are: Communication, organization, advocacy, active listener, critical thinking, boundary setting, patience, time management, resilience, empathy and building strong, positive, and trusting relationships.
While working at the Department of Social Services helping people receiving TCA maintain their work requirement, I obtained a Master’s of Social Work from the University of Maryland, Baltimore specializing in Child Welfare, and also completed an internship Foster Care and Adoption. I worked in Child Protective Services for several years enabling me to be able to go in a home and determine if it was “safe enough” for a child or children to remain in the home. Following child safety, I worked the addictions field helping people who were severely addicted to opioids slowly wean themselves off of opioid dependence. This enabled me to understand the difference between a person who is psychologically addicted to a substance versus one who’s body is physically dependent on a substance. I then worked with unhoused population helping people who had obtained housing vouchers maintain their housing vouchers by establishing and building relationships landlord, accompanying them to landlord/tenant court, and providing eviction prevention services. This is where I got my feet wet conducting therapy as once can imagine the amount of anxiety one my feel moving from sleeping on the streets to maintaining a 2- or 3-bedroom household. From there my experience has been primarily conducting mental therapy.
Effective therapy involves several factors, but building strong relationships and being open and honest can help a client feel more at ease when sharing difficult and sometimes painful experiences. I believe my skills and experiences have prepared me for a role such as this.