Dana helps adults who feel at the end of their rope—whether they are struggling with addiction, organizing their lives around someone else’s addiction, healing from an abusive or controlling relationship, or carrying grief that has become difficult to move through. She also works with anxiety, depression, OCD, codependency, anger, boundaries, and major life transitions.
Direct, wise, practical, and fiercely compassionate, Dana brings clarity to complicated situations and helps clients recognize choices they may not have seen before. She uses humor, honest feedback, structure, and concrete tools while keeping clients in charge of their own decisions. For clients seeking Christian counseling, Dana can incorporate Scripture, prayer, and biblical truth; clients who do not want faith included are equally welcome.
You do not need to relate to everything. One familiar experience may be enough to keep exploring.
Alcohol, drugs, gambling, or another compulsive behavior may offer temporary relief while creating shame, secrecy, damaged relationships, and consequences you can no longer ignore.
You spend your energy monitoring, rescuing, worrying, preventing crises, or trying to convince someone you love to change—and you are exhausted from carrying what was never yours to control.
A controlling, manipulative, or abusive relationship may have left you questioning your perceptions, minimizing your needs, or feeling guilty whenever you try to protect yourself.
The same thoughts, reactions, relationships, or coping patterns keep repeating. You want more clarity about your choices and practical help doing something different.
You may be grieving a death, divorce, relationship, physical ability, identity, religious community, season of life, or the realization that someone you love may never change.
You may want Scripture, prayer, or biblical truth incorporated into therapy, or you may need an honest place to process church hurt and spiritual abuse without having your experience minimized.
What it feels like to work with Dana
Dana brings a relaxed, open, and direct presence into therapy. Very little surprises her. She can sit with painful realities, complicated relationships, addiction, shame, anger, and grief without judging you, minimizing what has happened, or rushing to offer an easy answer.
Her style combines compassion, humor, practical tools, and rigorous honesty. Dana asks thoughtful questions, simplifies confusing situations, and reflects what she sees clearly. She will support and challenge you, but she will not take over the work or make your decisions for you.
Specialized areas of focus
Addiction can become the way you quiet anxiety, avoid painful emotions, escape obsessive thinking, or find temporary relief from a life that feels difficult to manage. Over time, the behavior may create shame, secrecy, broken promises, damaged relationships, and consequences you can no longer ignore.
Dana brings extensive experience with chemical and behavioral addictions. She helps you understand what the addiction is doing for you, identify the thoughts and emotions reinforcing it, and develop healthier ways to respond to distress. Her approach combines compassion with honest accountability and practical steps toward meaningful, sustainable recovery.
You may spend your time preventing crises, checking for signs of use, protecting someone from consequences, keeping the peace, or searching for the words that will finally convince them to change. Your own needs, relationships, and well-being may have gradually moved to the background.
Dana helps spouses, adult children, and other family members distinguish compassion from rescuing and support from overfunctioning. Therapy can help you accept what you cannot control, establish healthier boundaries, and begin building a life that is no longer organized around someone else’s addiction or reaction.
A controlling, demeaning, manipulative, or abusive relationship can gradually weaken your confidence in your own perceptions, needs, and decisions. You may recognize that something is wrong while still feeling guilty for setting a boundary, disappointing someone, or choosing what is best for you.
Dana helps you name harmful patterns clearly without blaming you for how you survived or pressuring you to move faster than you are ready. Together, you can strengthen your boundaries, rebuild trust in your judgment, and develop the emotional independence to remain connected to other people without abandoning yourself.
A deeper look at the work
The concern bringing you to therapy may be connected to several parts of your life. Explore the areas below for a fuller sense of the patterns Dana can help you understand and the practical changes you may begin making.
Anxiety can keep your mind scanning for what might go wrong, replaying conversations, questioning decisions, or trying to create certainty before you take action. Intrusive or obsessive thoughts may feel especially distressing when they conflict with your values or the person you believe yourself to be.
Dana helps you slow down these patterns and distinguish between a thought, a feeling, and a fact. Together, you can examine the beliefs reinforcing the anxiety, recognize unhelpful responses, and practice more effective ways to tolerate uncertainty and emotional discomfort.
Therapy can help you respond to your thoughts with greater clarity instead of allowing fear, rumination, or compulsive reassurance-seeking to make your decisions.
Depression may leave you feeling exhausted, withdrawn, irritable, or convinced that nothing you do will make a meaningful difference. Responsibilities can become difficult to manage, and negative beliefs about yourself may begin to sound like unquestionable facts.
Dana offers space to talk honestly about what is weighing on you without expecting you to pretend that things are better than they are. She helps you identify the experiences and thought patterns contributing to discouragement while continuing to look for the abilities, resources, and choices depression may be obscuring.
Change often begins with small, manageable actions. Therapy can help you practice those steps while developing greater self-respect, emotional awareness, and hope.
Grief can follow a death, divorce, estrangement, career change, health concern, or the loss of a future you expected to have. You may feel pressure to move forward while still trying to understand what happened and who you are now.
Dana provides room to acknowledge the full reality of the loss, including sadness, anger, relief, confusion, regret, and the practical consequences that accompany major change. She helps you separate what can still be addressed from what must gradually be accepted.
Therapy can support you as you make difficult decisions, rebuild daily stability, and begin creating a life that honors what mattered without remaining entirely defined by what was lost.
Anger may be the emotion you notice first, even when fear, hurt, helplessness, shame, or exhaustion is underneath it. Stress can make your reactions feel automatic, leaving little space between what happens and what you say or do next.
Dana helps you identify triggers, understand what your reactions are attempting to protect, and recognize the thoughts that intensify your emotional response. Her approach does not shame anger or excuse harmful behavior.
Together, you can develop practical ways to pause, communicate more effectively, tolerate distress, and respond in ways that better reflect your values and long-term goals.
Family patterns can shape how you understand love, loyalty, conflict, responsibility, and belonging. You may have learned to keep the peace, manage other people’s emotions, fear abandonment, or remain closely connected at the expense of developing a clear identity of your own.
Dana may use structured questions, family history, and genograms to help you recognize where familiar patterns began and how they continue to affect your relationships and choices. Understanding the origin of a pattern does not mean you are required to keep repeating it.
Therapy can help you remain connected to people you love while developing healthier boundaries, greater emotional independence, and more confidence in your own judgment.
Harm within a church or religious community can be difficult to recognize when control, exclusion, shame, manipulation, or misuse of authority was presented as spiritual leadership. The loss may involve relationships, community, identity, trust, and your understanding of God.
Dana does not minimize harmful behavior because it occurred in a religious setting. She offers room to name what happened and examine its emotional and relational impact without requiring you to protect the person or institution responsible.
You will not be pressured to return to a particular church, forgive before you are ready, or reach a predetermined spiritual conclusion. Faith can be included when requested, while your questions, boundaries, and preferences remain central.
Christian counseling with Dana
Dana offers Christian counseling for adults who want faith to be part of therapy. She can connect relevant Scripture and biblical principles to your goals, pray with you when requested, and help you consider how faith influences addiction recovery, relationships, grief, identity, emotional health, and decision-making. Faith is never used to shame you, pressure you toward a particular decision, or avoid the honest and practical work that change requires.
Professional details
Review Dana’s education, therapeutic approaches, client fit, and practical session information.
Dana is an independently licensed Arizona counselor with more than 20 years of experience. She has extensive experience helping adults affected by chemical and behavioral addiction, relational abuse, grief, and difficult emotional patterns.
Dana draws from cognitive, attachment-based, experiential, motivational, and addiction-recovery approaches. She combines honest conversation and deeper insight with structure, psychoeducation, and concrete skills clients can practice outside of therapy.
Dana provides individual therapy for adults. She does not offer couples counseling, teen therapy, family counseling, parent consultation, or parent coaching. She does not treat active suicidality, dissociative disorders, Dissociative Identity Disorder, or complex trauma. Clients needing immediate stabilization may require a higher level of support.
Dana, in a few words
Dana is a retired competitive bodybuilder who continues to train regularly and spend time hiking. Her experience as an athlete taught her that meaningful change rarely happens overnight. It develops through honest evaluation, consistency, and a willingness to keep practicing—even when the steps forward feel small.
For more than 15 years, Dana has volunteered with the Gospel Rescue Mission, where she facilitates a Healthy Relationships group. She has a particular heart for people experiencing homelessness and values being part of the process through which individuals rebuild stability, prepare for employment, and establish a life of their own.
Dana has also been designing and creating quilts for more than 40 years. She appreciates the patience and imagination required to bring separate pieces together into something cohesive and meaningful. That same respect for process shapes her work as a therapist: change takes time, the pieces do not always make sense at first, and progress does not require perfection.
How therapy may unfold
Begin by talking honestly about what brought you to therapy, what is no longer working, and what you want to change. Dana listens carefully, asks direct questions, and helps bring simplicity to situations that feel confusing or overwhelming.
Identify the triggers, beliefs, family dynamics, coping strategies, and relationship patterns shaping your choices. As the pattern becomes clearer, options that were previously difficult to recognize often begin to emerge.
Put insight into action through small, repeatable changes. Practice expressing emotions, strengthening boundaries, responding differently to triggers, and making decisions that support greater clarity and emotional independence.
Dana rides in the sidecar—offering clarity, encouragement, and honest feedback while you remain in the driver’s seat.
Clarity can begin here
You do not need to have the final answer, know exactly which boundary to set, or feel ready to change everything before scheduling. If Dana feels like a possible fit, begin with what is happening now. Together, you can name the pattern clearly, separate what you can control from what you cannot, recognize choices that may have been difficult to see, and take the next practical step toward a life that feels more honest and more your own. If you are still deciding, take the time you need to compare counselors.