Counseling Center Staff

I was born and raised in Osaka, Japan. The choices I have made throughout my education and career reflect my deep-seated interests in cross-cultural communication, healing arts and sciences, and the promotion of inclusion, equity, and unity in diversity. During my junior year at Kansai Gaidai University, I completed an international student exchange program at the University of Stirling in Scotland, which led me to view life through the lens of a sojourner, choosing to live in cultures foreign to me from the standpoint of an outsider-within. Academically, I earned an M.S. in Women’s Studies from Minnesota State University, Mankato, and a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from the University of Kentucky. Professionally, I completed a pre-doctoral internship at the Ohio State University Counseling and Consultation Services and worked as a mental health counselor at the Morehead State University Counseling and Health Services for 5 years before I accepted my current position at the WKU Counseling Center in 2017.

I am a licensed psychologist with the health service provider designation, a psychosynthesis practitioner trained at the Kentucky Center of Psychosynthesis, and a Level I MBSR teacher certified by the Brown University Mindfulness Center. I love counseling college students in support of their personal growth and pursuit of knowledge and vocation of their interests, helping them to learn how to nurture their own psychological well-being and mental health.

Personally, I am an introverted-intuitive-feeler by nature, a translator by function, and a green witch. To nourish the interconnected whole of my mind, body, heart, and soul, I turn to books, Tarot, ethnic foods, swimming, yoga, music, and art. I love plants, birds, and people with whom I resonate in this life and beyond, and places where I am reminded of who I am and why I exist.

I believe that anyone can benefit from counseling if they want to learn, heal, and grow. We all want to be happy, but many of us suffer from not knowing what truly brings us joy, or believing we lack or don't deserve it. Most of us muddle through such confusion, uncertainty, and faulty beliefs in adolescence through young adulthood. Some of us grow up in environments that seem unconducive to happiness or carry unresolved trauma from childhood into adulthood, which makes learning more complicated, but also more illuminating and enriching as we heal and grow. Healing is the process of unblocking, reconnecting, and remembering to be whole again. Growth is the process of progressive change, expanding in breadth, depth, and height.

Your therapist can be someone who supports and challenges you in being and becoming your authentic self, learning to use your mind wisely, walking your own path, and shining your light that is uniquely beautiful. It is painful to be misperceived, misunderstood, ignored, dismissed, criticized, or rejected. However, if you are trying to avoid the pain by fitting in with anything that is not you, meeting someone else’s expectations, or trying to be accepted and liked by everyone, you end up hiding, dimming, or distorting your light. It takes courage to keep your heart soft and open after being hurt, face your darkness with compassion, and be vulnerable. Yet that is how you can meet and connect with people who truly love and appreciate you. If you envision social justice as I do, remember the personal is political, and the political is personal. You can be an agent of change in your own way with your gifts, manifesting the change you want to see in the world instead of wishing the world to change for you.

As a generalist clinician, I take an integrative approach to therapy within a feminist-multicultural framework. I support students navigating a broad range of psychological issues and mental health concerns, including identity development, interpersonal relationships, psychosocial and vocational development, attachment wounds, existential crises, cultural adjustment and adaptation, trauma, grief, addictions, and most psychiatric conditions listed in the DSM-5. Depending on each client's needs, I draw therapeutic interventions derived from Psychosynthesis, Interpersonal Process Therapy, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Cognitive-Processing Therapy, and Prolonged Exposure Therapy.

For my master's project, I examined the cultural context and praxis of feminist counseling in Japan to demonstrate how therapeutic practice and advocacy serve as a catalyst for personal and collective change. For my doctoral dissertation, I conducted mix-method research to explore the relationship among forgiveness, self-compassion, and psychological well-being among Buddhists in the United States. I enjoy reading research that sparks new insights into enhancing clinical work or offers empirical evidence for what clinicians have known to be effective in practice. As a clinical supervisor, a group facilitator, and a guest lecturer, I enjoy teaching students in helping professions how to apply mindfulness-based therapeutic approaches and their psychological knowledge and skills for helping their clients. Currently, I am most interested in making the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) group program more accessible, inclusive, and trauma-sensitive, and exploring ways to teach an 8-week MBSR course on our campus.