MA, LMHC · Counselor · Educator · Advocate
For every person I've sat with, taught, trained, or built alongside — understanding begins from the inside out.
Supporting adolescents and young adults in becoming themselves. Helping families understand what's actually happening between them. Building a field that starts from the right place.
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Candid, warm, in context
The Starting Place
People make sense in context. Just as no two trees grow the same way — shaped by light, soil, season, and their own nature — every person carries a coherent inner logic. The work is learning to see that clearly, with curiosity and without correction.
For Families & Young People
Growing up is genuinely complicated. Navigating identity, belonging, shifting relationships, and a changing sense of self — all at once. That's a lot for any young person to carry.
My work focuses on helping them make sense of their experience from the inside out. Not by telling them who they should be, but by helping them understand who they already are. For some clients, neurodivergence is part of that picture. For others it isn't. The approach is the same: curiosity over compliance.
The Family Dimension
I also work closely with families — because sometimes the most important thing a young person needs is for the adults around them to understand what's actually happening, and to learn how to show up in ways that actually land.
Understanding how each person's neuroprocessing style interacts with the others is the map. Once you have it, a lot of what felt like conflict starts to look like something else entirely.
Three dimensions. One living person.
First layer
What is expected and typical for this age and stage. The universal terrain every young person navigates.
Where they meet
What it is actually like to be a 13-year-old autistic teenager, navigating identity, belonging, and a changing nervous system all at once. This is where the real picture lives.
Second layer
What is specific to this person's neurodivergent processing. A different architecture of perception, attention, and meaning-making.
The most important territory
"These three look different, respond differently, and matter differently. Knowing which one you're looking at changes everything about how you help."
In practice
"I untangle what is due to typical development and what is due to atypical development. What is autism and what is just because they are 13."
With families
"I function, only half-jokingly, as a parent-teen interpreter. Sometimes kids can hear something from a third party that they genuinely cannot hear from the people they love most."
the frequencies
that reach
each other
New Work in Progress
Love that doesn't land in a way the other person's nervous system can receive doesn't feel like love, no matter how sincerely it's meant. Like water — it doesn't force its way through stone. It finds the path that's actually open.
Neuroprocessing love languages. The processing styles that determine whether love actually registers as love.
The stories we're living together and the stories we're telling each other get out of sync. That gap is exactly where the work begins.
A kid who regulates by moving and being loud. A parent whose nervous system reads that as a five-alarm fire. Nobody is wrong. The map just hasn't been drawn yet.
The Full Scope
Beneath every healthy forest is a mycelium network — invisible connections sharing nutrients between trees, communicating across distance, supporting growth that no single organism could achieve alone. That's what this ecosystem is.
Clinical practice, professional training, academic rigor, and community advocacy. Not separate tracks. One living system where each level feeds the others.
Micro Level
Spangler Counseling
Specialized support for neurodivergent adolescents, young adults, and families. Therapeutic gaming, identity development, and genuine accommodation. Grounded in developmental theory and real-world flexibility.
Meso Level
The LMHCA Incubator
A teaching-hospital model for mental health. Pre-licensed clinicians train inside a practice that walks its talk — developing reflexivity, systemic thinking, and neuro-affirming skills before independent practice.
Academic Level
Antioch University Seattle
Directing the Neurodiversity Concentration and Certificate Program inside a CACREP-accredited counseling program. One of the first of its kind. Built to shift how the next generation of clinicians works with neurodivergent clients.
Macro Level
Puget Sound Neurodiversity Project
Connecting clinicians, educators, and community advocates across the Pacific Northwest to build lasting infrastructure for neuro-affirming care. Beyond the clinic. Beyond the classroom.
Who This Is
I came to this work through lived experience before I came to it through training.
Dyslexia shaped how I moved through systems that weren't built for my brain. A brain tumor and resulting TBI later gave me an involuntary before-and-after on neurological processing — what changes, what remains, and what it costs to navigate a world that doesn't account for either.
I grew up in a household where seeing people deeply was a foundational practice. Not a technique. A way of being. I went to a school built on the radical premise that motivation comes from the inside, and that trusting a young person's curiosity is the most powerful thing an educator can do. At sixteen I taught a class called "Finding Self." I've been doing versions of that ever since.
Over twenty years of clinical practice, graduate teaching, and community building later — the starting point hasn't changed. Every person makes sense in context. The work is learning to see that clearly, with curiosity and without correction.
Father's Work
David Spangler / Lorian. Seeing people at an essential level. The Self as a coherent presence before diagnosis, comparison, or environmental shaping.
Mother's Work
Personology. A precise, trait-based map of automatic patterns. How each person's nervous system deploys into the world — and how those patterns interact in relationship.
School
Puget Sound Community School. Motivation from the inside. No grades, no coercion. Andy Smallman as central mentor. Living the philosophy before having language for it.
Improv
Yes-And as a complete philosophical stance. Whatever arrives is real and workable. Recognition before intervention. Presence before prescription. Build from what's actually there.
Outside the work: Dad. Walking his daughter to school in the rain. Naps when his system needs them. Geeks out over technology without needing to be an expert at it. The breadth of the professional work is itself a regulation strategy — each role feeds the others, none of them burns out alone.
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Natural, warm, in context
"Difference is not dysfunction. And as a counselor — everything I do either reinforces that or challenges it. There is no neutral ground."
The overarching thread
Stay in the Loop
Parent coaching, family neuroprocessing support, neurodiversity resources for coaches and educators, CE webinars for clinicians. No noise. Just signal, when there's something worth sharing.