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.
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. Being given great responsibility in other people’s homes repeatedly throughout my formative years ended up developing my character, my confidence, and my curiosity in human development.
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 clinical settings. I acquired all kinds of “evidence-based” methods & modalities rooted in behavior management and early childhood development. I would never consider using some of these methods again, as they go directly against my personal and professional values and everything I know about human attachment. Some of it, though, resonated deeply and served as a catalyst for where I’m at in my professional career today.
In 2011, I was living in Burlington, VT working with an incredible team of early childhood mental health providers. There, I attended a training led by 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 learned that emotional attunement (the presence of an emotionally regulated caregiver) and secure attachment are crucial foundational building blocks of child/human development. With this knowledge, I continued to work directly with children and their families for almost 10 years.
In January 2022, I made the choice to jump into private practice with the goal of helping parents as a way of helping kids. I have built a clientele within the standard clinical medical model. In this process, 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. I'll be honest: feeling overwhelmed, lost, & tapped out 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 am grateful to currently offer therapeutic support to adult individuals in relationships of all kinds who are wanting support managing anxiety, establishing & communicating boundaries, and increasing self-worth.
Working with families is a big part of my "why", so when the opportunity presented itself to continue parenting work outside of the constraints of "the system", I jumped on it. 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 bit of my training, background, and expertise. Having the opportunity to become certified to coach and support others through this model is an honor.
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 deliberate behavior modification that happens here. This work that we do together isn’t about changing your kids. This work is about supporting you first in building compassion for yourself during this hard season. From there, we swap out the lens that you’re viewing it all through, focus on connecting with the kid(s) you have, and team up with them to help them build skills.
This work is more than just swapping out lenses. 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 for generations with the best of intentions, 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 learn that even your lowest moments, the ones you're least proud of as a parent, are adaptive strategies that became patterned to help you make it through. Eventually, you'll start to see your old frames with deep appreciation: they got you here, and your new ones 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.
