Meet Our Team
Our team members have worked together for over 10 years. While we each bring our personal experience, various expertise, and individual style, we work together to deliver DBT with excellence, endorse a dialectical philosophy, and value the prioritization of client-centered therapeutic care.
Mariah was trained in DBT in 2015 and has “drank the Kool-Aid” ever since. She is grateful to sit with others in their pain and draws inspiration from Zen mindfulness practice. She loves nerding out and collecting data to understand patterns of behavior and create meaningful change. Mariah enjoys helping people with panic, anxiety, and PTSD.
Mariah Conklin, LMSW, DBT-LBC
Ali has been in the mental health field for the last 14 years and has been providing DBT for the past 10 years. She also specializes in working with transgender and gender non-conforming people. Ali has lived with black widow spiders, so is not afraid of what you may bring to therapy.
Alexandra Johnson, LMSW
Rachel Potesta, LMSW
Rachel has 10 years of experience in various mental health settings, including comprehensive DBT, inpatient substance use treatment, and other community based-mental health. She likes rooting for the underdog and finding ways to make serious issues more enjoyable to tackle.
Lyndsay has conducted DBT for the past 12 years and has been specializing in DBT for substance use for 10 years. She enjoys working with mental health professionals, athletes, and family members of those struggling with addiction. She believes humor is an essential ingredient of healing.
Lyndsay Nuyen, LMSW, CCS, DBT-LBC
How We Work Together
As a team, we adopt specific guiding principles and assumptions about clients, therapists, and treatment. To help us maintain motivation and adherence to DBT, we agree as a team to the following:
Dialectical Agreement
We agree to accept a dialectical philosophy. We agree there is no absolute truth. It is natural and not undesirable for polarities to exist. When caught between strong opinions, we agree to search for synthesis rather than truth.
Phenomenological Empathy Agreement
All therapists agree to search for a non-pejorative, phenomenologically empathic explanation for client and team member behavior. We agree to assume that people are trying their best and want to improve. When a therapist struggles to implement this agreement, team members take a non-pejorative, emphatic stance about the therapist’s upset AND find a non-pejorative, empathic explanation for client’s behavior.
Consultation to the Client Agreement
We agree that we do not serve as intermediaries for clients or therapists on the team. Our task is to help clients interact effectively with other therapists, instead of telling other therapists how to interact with clients. When a therapist behaves fallibly, we agree to help the client cope with this behavior, not reform the therapist.
Observing Limits Agreement
Therapists need to be aware of and observe their own limits both with clients and with team members. Limits may evolve and not all therapists will have the same limits. We take a nonjudgemental stance toward limits and not infer the meaning of narrow or broad limits.
Consistency Agreement
Consistency between therapists is not necessary as long as therapists are functioning within the structure of DBT. Therapists do not need to have the same rules, expectations, or conditions for therapy.
Fallibility Agreement
All therapists are fallible and will fail on multiple occasions despite their efforts. Therapists are jerks, and agree ahead of time that we have probably done whatever problematic things we are accused of. We apply DBT on each other and balance problem-solving with validation of the inherent wisdom of each therapist’s stance. Because we are fallible, we will inevitably violate all of these agreements, and depend on each other to regain balance.