Behind the Healing: The Practice

There is something incredibly meaningful about building something that you once only dreamed about.

For years, I worked in community mental health and group practice settings. Those experiences shaped me as a therapist, gave me opportunities to serve a wide variety of people, and helped me understand the kind of clinician I wanted to become. But throughout those years, I continued to carry a long-term goal with me: one day, I wanted to create my own practice centered around equine-assisted trauma therapy.

Following the birth of my second child, I finally decided it was time to take that dream from an idea and turn it into a reality.

And so, High Hopes Equine Assisted Healing, PLLC was born.

What started as a long-term goal has become a labor of love over the last handful of years. Building a practice of my own has certainly come with challenges, learning curves, and moments of uncertainty, but I genuinely wouldn’t change the journey for anything.

There is something incredibly rewarding about being able to show myself—and my family and children—that I am capable of taking an idea I believed in and building something meaningful from the ground up.

A Practice Rooted in Service

At the heart of my work is a desire to serve.

I feel incredibly fortunate to have a career that allows me to do work that aligns so closely with my personal values. There is a certain sense of settling and comfort that comes from knowing that the work you do each day connects with the kind of person you want to be and the kind of impact you want to have on the world.

For me, therapy has always been about more than simply helping someone manage symptoms. It is about helping people understand themselves, recognize their strengths, develop new skills, and discover that they are often capable of much more than they have been led to believe.

That belief is one of the foundations of my practice.

Strengths Before Deficits

A strength-based approach is an absolute pillar of High Hopes Equine Assisted Healing.

So often, people enter therapy already carrying a story about what they can’t do.

Maybe they believe they aren’t resilient enough.
Maybe they don’t have the skills to manage their emotions.
Maybe they aren’t confident, capable, worthy, or “good” at something.
Maybe years of difficult experiences have taught them to focus more on their perceived shortcomings than their strengths.

I don’t want therapy to reinforce that story.

Instead, I want to help clients identify the strengths that are already there—and then build upon them.

This doesn’t mean ignoring challenges or pretending that difficult experiences haven’t happened. Strength-based therapy makes space for the hard things while also asking an important question:

What strengths have helped you get this far?

Sometimes those strengths are obvious. Other times, we have to look a little deeper.

Maybe surviving a difficult experience required tremendous perseverance. Maybe asking for help required courage. Maybe continuing to show up each day demonstrates resilience. Maybe being deeply sensitive to the emotions of others is actually a strength that simply needs boundaries and support.

Therapy can become a place where we learn to see ourselves through a different lens.

Changing the Conversation Inside Your Head

One of the things I especially enjoy helping clients work on is their inner self-talk.

For people who already struggle with self-esteem, anxiety, trauma, neurodivergence, or feeling like they aren’t “enough,” the internal dialogue can become incredibly harsh. Negative, fixed, or ruminative thoughts can feel automatic—and sometimes they have been present for so long that they begin to feel like facts.

But thoughts are not always facts.

Part of the work at High Hopes is learning how to recognize those patterns and begin shifting the way we talk to ourselves.

We work toward moving from:

“I can’t do this.”
to
“This is difficult, but I can learn ways to manage it.”

From:

“I’m bad at this.”
to
“This is something I am still learning.”

From:

“Something is wrong with me.”
to
“There are parts of myself I am still learning to understand and support.”

And from:

“I should be able to handle this.”
to
“I am allowed to need support.”

The goal isn’t to replace every negative thought with forced positivity. It is to develop inner self-talk that is strengths-based, compassionate, realistic, and aware.

That shift can change so much.

Why High Hopes?

The name High Hopes Equine Assisted Healing carries meaning for me, and there is much more to that story.

The name represents the vision and values behind this practice—the belief that healing can involve hope, growth, connection, and discovering possibilities that may not have felt possible before.

But the story behind the name deserves its own space.

In the post in this series, Behind the Healing: The Mission, I’ll share more about why I chose the name High Hopes Equine Assisted Healing and what it represents.

For now, I’ll simply say this:

I am incredibly grateful that a dream I carried for years has become a place where people can come to heal, learn, grow, and discover their own strengths.

This practice is deeply personal to me— it represents years of learning, dreaming, serving, and believing that therapy can be a place where people discover hope in themselves.

And I am honored to be able to walk alongside them as they do.