"The ache of the human heart has always been to be made whole."
Hello! My name is Christie.
My own story has shaped the way I’ve learned to sit with yours.
Much of the work I do today has grown out of a desire to offer others the kind of presence and care I have longed for in my own life.
There have been seasons when I needed someone willing to stay curious with me—to listen beyond the presenting problem, to help me make sense of what I was experiencing, and to hold space for questions that did not have quick answers. I have also known the gift of receiving that kind of care: being accompanied by people who helped me listen more carefully to my own story and recognize the presence of God within places I had struggled to understand.
Over time, that longing became part of my calling. It shaped not only my decision to become a counselor, but the kind of counselor I want to be. I don’t come to another person’s story because I have arrived somewhere they have not. I come as someone who knows the courage it can require to tell the truth about our lives and the gift of having another person willing to listen as we do.
My Story
For much of my life, I knew how to keep moving. I could be capable, responsible, faithful, and attentive to the needs around me without always recognizing how much of my own story I was carrying with me.
As I began to pay closer attention to my life, I discovered that the past does not remain so neatly tucked behind us. The relationships that form us, the places we experience belonging or its absence, the losses we endure, and the ways we learn to protect ourselves often continue to shape how we experience the present. I began to understand that some of what I had assumed was simply “who I am” had a story.
Learning to attend to my own story has involved truth-telling and grief, curiosity and compassion, repentance and forgiveness. It has also meant discovering that God is not absent from the places I would rather avoid. Again and again, I have found Jesus willing to meet me within my actual story rather than the version of it I thought I should have.
When Faith and Hurt Became Entangled
The Church has been one of the great gifts of my life. It has been a place of belonging, formation, worship, friendship, and encounter with God. It has also been a place where I have experienced hurt.
Walking through church hurt complicated some of the categories I once held more neatly. I came to understand more personally that communities intended for belonging and care can also become places of confusion, misuse of authority, relational harm, and deep disappointment. When that happens, the wounds can reach beyond our relationships with people and affect our understanding of ourselves and our experience of God.
That season taught me the importance of listening carefully when someone tells me that something is wrong. It made me slower to explain suffering away, defend a system or institution, or reach too quickly for a spiritual answer. It also deepened my love for the Church. I believe Christian community can be a profound place of healing and formation, while recognizing that we must be willing to tell the truth about the ways people can be harmed within it.
Longing Became Calling
My movement toward counseling grew slowly from the intersection of my own story, my love for people, my faith, and a growing desire to understand what helps us become more whole.
I found myself increasingly drawn toward the places where people were trying to make sense of suffering, relationships, faith, and the stories they carried. I wanted to learn how to stay with someone there—not simply to offer an answer, but to listen well, ask better questions, help name what had been difficult to name, and attend with them to what God might be doing.
That desire eventually led me into formal training in biblical counseling and then into increasingly focused study of trauma, story, attachment, relationships, and spiritual formation. What began as a longing to offer the kind of care I had needed gradually became a vocation: walking alongside others as they seek greater truth, freedom, connection, and wholeness in Christ.
Becoming Story + Soul Care
My understanding of care has continued to deepen as I have continued to learn. Scripture remains the ground beneath my work, while my study of trauma, attachment, interpersonal neurobiology, narrative-focused care, embodiment, and relational formation has helped me attend more carefully to the complexity of the people sitting before me.
I have become increasingly convinced that meaningful care requires us to take seriously the whole person. We are embodied and relational, shaped by stories and communities, capable of both suffering and causing harm, carrying desires and defenses, and created for communion with God and one another. Our struggles rarely fit neatly into a single category.
Story + Soul Care grew out of that widening understanding. It gives me language for a way of caring that makes room for the stories that have shaped us while attending to the deeper work of formation—how we are learning to live, love, relate, receive, grieve, hope, and become increasingly responsive to the presence of God.
I don’t consider this the arrival at a finished method. My own formation continues, as does my learning as a counselor. I want to remain a student of Scripture, of the people entrusted to my care, of the wisdom available through thoughtful clinical study, and of the Spirit’s work in the particular and often unfinished stories of our lives.
My Experience
God designed us as whole beings—body, mind, and soul—each intricately connected. Because of this, my work is clinically informed while remaining firmly anchored in the hope and authority of Scripture. I am certified or have training in the following:
- Confessional Communities Training Program (Certificate, 2026)
- Narrative-Focused Trauma Care (NFTC-I, 2024-25)
- Men of Peace Advanced Trained Facilitator (2025)
- Level 2 Certified Christian Trauma Care Provider (CCTCP-II, 2024)
- Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI, 2024)—an attachment-based, trauma-informed approach designed for vulnerable children
- Association of Biblical Counselors (Level I, 2021)
- Certified Enneagram Coach (2019)
Every counseling journey unfolds differently. I'm here to help you with yours.
some fun facts
Get to know me a little better
When I’m not working...
I can often be found engrossed in a good non-fiction book accompanied by an iced americano. I'm also standing in front of my art table creating some kind of beauty while I offer meager prayers up to Jesus. Or I might be digging my hands in the earth trying to grow a thing.
I’m always up for a good...
poem. Poetry takes me to places I wouldn't naturally go on my own, opens up ideas and creativity, helps me to pay attention a bit more, to see this world poetically.
I can't live without...
Community. Community with my kids and husband, confessional community, co-laborers. They show me I'm valued and I get to see the glory and goodness of God in them.
Also plants. My collection of plants remind me to drink water and turn my face to the sun.
