“Navigating life’s challenges can be made better with someone alongside you, mucking around in the hard stuff, exploring one’s own inner and outer life with attentiveness and nonjudgment, and celebrating forward movement together with you. I believe that people fundamentally make sense once you get to know them, even in all their uniqueness and complexity. Hardship comes from somewhere. Ways of reacting, being in relationships and responding to our emotions come from somewhere. We are creatures that constantly take in lessons from our environment – but sometimes important lessons in one context keep us from living more freely, flexibly, and with fulfillment as we encounter new people and situations. My hope is to try to make sense of it all together, to engage in both emotional processing and practices of acceptance, as well as to strive towards change with concrete strategies.”
Julia is passionate about collaborating with clients to better understand themselves by guiding them with curiosity and compassion toward understanding their internal processes, developing mindful observation skills, and examining repeated themes in their lives – and how these have played a role in both past and present. The clarification of one’s self-view, values, and relational difficulties and desires are vital in order to move forward in a grounded and authentic way. Julia’s clients can expect a warm, non-judgmental space where they feel safe to explore their thoughts and emotions, while simultaneously expecting gentle challenges that meets them where they are.
Julia takes an integrative approach that draws from psychodynamic theory, focusing on how the past affects the present, emotional exploration, and how interpersonal relationships influence a person’s behavior and well-being. In a complementary fashion, Julia utilizes 3rd Wave CBT techniques, supporting clients to develop skillful, creative ways of responding to their thoughts and emotions in order to act in alignment with their values and strive towards growth and healing.
Julia received a Bachelor of Science in Biopsychology, Cognition, & Neuroscience from the University of Michigan, where she also worked for three years as a Psychological Care Worker on the Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Unit at Mott Children’s Hospital, University of Michigan Medicine. She has earned a Master of Arts in Clinical Psychology from the University of Indianapolis. She has also been pursuing her doctoral degree in clinical psychology (PsyD) since 2021, providing individual and group therapy in addition to comprehensive psychological evaluations across many levels of care, including a college counseling center, private practice, and community mental health. Julia is currently a Doctoral Intern at Pine Rest, providing outpatient psychotherapy services at the Southwest Clinic for clients age 10-65, completing psychological diagnostic consultations for individuals receiving inpatient care, and facilitating group therapies, including the outpatient Healthy Living Group in addition to inpatient group therapy on the Child & Adolescent Inpatient Unit. Julia is currently completing her dissertation that examines attraction-inducing exercises with couples, assessing possible positive relational outcomes to this intervention.