Hi, I'm Natalie.

My experience in helping parents started when I was 11: when I was just a kid myself, I was entrusted with caring for other people's. 

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Decades later, I now have lived experience of how much love a parent has for their child, and how necessary it is to feel like you have a village of people that can help you care for them. Something in adolescent me was trustworthy and dependable enough to take a chance on. Being given great responsibility in other people’s homes repeatedly throughout my formative years inadvertently ended up developing my character, my confidence, and my curiosity in human development. 

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When it was time to become a “real adult”, I chose Social Work as a career track, not because I had lifelong aspirations to become a social worker, but because it felt like an obvious continuation of everything I’d always done: caring for other human beings. On it went, direct care of other people’s people in a variety of settings. I acquired all kinds of “evidence-based” methods & modalities and put them to use. I received all kinds of training & certifications rooted in behavior management and early childhood development. Some of the more popular behavior methods that I was trained in make present day me want to crawl under a table and plead the fifth, but some of it was incredibly impactful and served as a catalyst for where I’m at in my professional career today.

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In Burlington, VT in 2011, I attended a training with Dr. Bruce Perry and, for the first time, was introduced to the concept of co-regulation (before social media brought it into the zeitgeist). I was taught in my role as an early childhood mental health provider that emotional attunement  (the presence of an emotionally regulated caregiver) and secure attachment are important foundational components of child development. As I progressed through graduate school, I kept these principles at the forefront of my mind and continued for years working clinically with kids & families. 

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That brought me to January 2022, when I made the choice to jump out of the children’s world and try my hand at helping parents as a way of helping kids: I opened my practice with the intention of focusing on targeting parenting skills within the clinical medial model. What I found is that it is sometimes clinically justifiable to approach skill-building in parenting in this way, but something about it started feeling inauthentic. Let me be blunt: feeling overwhelmed & lost in parenting is very often not a diagnosable mental health condition. For me to utilize my existing skill set & framework to support you in your parenting journey, I’ve had to prove medical necessity and offer services around a specific mental health diagnosis. I have respect for the medical model and believe proper diagnosis is important. I continue to enjoy my work as a therapist, and have pivoted to focusing on supporting individuals in relationships of all kinds who are struggling with anxiety, communication, boundaries, and self-worth. Parent work still has my heart, so when the opportunity presented itself to continue the work outside of the constraints of "the system", I jumped on it.

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In the summer of 2023, I applied and was selected to become trained as a Good Inside™️ Certified Parent Coach. The opportunity to receive this certification felt like the most obvious next right thing for me, a natural fit, as Good Inside so beautifully makes space for me to apply every single bit of my training, background, and expertise. Having the opportunity to become certified to coach and support others through this model is an honor.

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You might be seeking ways to get your child to stop behaving a certain way, and you might be looking for behavior management strategies to help accomplish that. We'll strategize and find ways to change your dynamics, but it's not behavior modification that happens here. This work that we do together isn’t about changing your kids, it’s about supporting you in swapping out the lens that you’re viewing them through, connecting with the person they are, and building skills. Lens shift doesn't quite cover it: this work gets you an entirely new pair of glasses all together. As it turns out, your old pair, the pair that have been passed down throughout your family with the best of intentions for generations, are worn the F out. It’s okay, though, because I’m not asking you to smash them and throw them out. I want us to, almost ceremoniously, tuck them away and glance at them only when you need a reminder of where you've come from. You'll start to see your old lenses with deep appreciation: they got you here, and your new lenses are going to get you where you're going. Here, there's space for all of it.

 

I'm so happy you've landed here, and I'm looking forward to becoming a part of your village.