For care professionals, for primary caregivers, for parents.

For the wounds of feminine socialization.  For a new culture of care.  For feminist caregivers. For care providers who run hard until they hit the wall.  For challengers of oppressive care, caregiver erosion, and the Mommy Complex.  For those who are giving more than they have.  For dualities, nuances, and both/and.  

For when you “love your profession, but…”

And for all the things that hang there, unspoken.

I create spaces for care-based service providers to speak the unspoken, so that you can settle your body, restore your spirit, build community, and integrate your identity- and create the business and leadership practices we all need.

So that your work can be more than just your labor.

This is helpful to my clients because it creates a space that doesn’t exist in our world:

One in which they can name, live, revel in, and grieve their full experience.

One in which they can slow down and create safety in their bodies, emotions, and nervous systems.

One in which they can stop trying to be “neutral” or “blank slates.”

One in which their stories can not only be told, but beautifully integrated into their business vision and practices.

One in which care for the self and the creation and care of community are a double helix, not mutually exclusive.

One that holds both the owner of the business and its clients with positive regard, sovereignty, and trust.

One that aims to create a new culture of care so that future care providers won’t even recognize this one.

Who Do I Think I Am?:

• I have started (and then moved and re-started) two care-based businesses (Highwire Therapy and The Matriarchy), so I know the pleasure and the pain that comes with being an entrepreneur.

• I have worked in community social service agencies and mental health clinics, as a teacher, in research and academic social work, in a group practice, and in private practice as a licensed clinical social worker, specializing in supporting caregivers.  I am well-versed in the plight of the self-sacrificing care professional.

• I am a parent and the eldest daughter, so I have personal caregiving responsibilities as well as professional ones.

• I am certified in Copywriting for Culture Makers and Social Media for Culture Makers, by Kelly Diels.

• I am trained in Financial Social Work, so I can speak to the money, honey.

• I am a White, cis woman of relative means, who is also able-bodied, thin, and conventionally attractive.  These things aren’t and shouldn’t be qualifications, though I recognize that they all make me appear inherently more trustworthy and capable to a large sector of society.  Instead, I name them because my forever duty as a carrier of these privileges is to never stop working to betray them (h/t Alan Pelaez), and to encourage the same of my clients.

• I created the Care Leadership Framework to legitimize and substantiate care-based services, and help service providers create matriarchal businesses.

• In 2009, I doodled the term “rogue social worker” into one of my journals.  I had only just graduated with my MSW, so I’m not sure how I was so disillusioned and/or prescient already, but lo, here we are.

• You can learn more about my feminist values and business practices here.

What this means for you is that I have had a front-row seat from all angles of the court as to how care gets weaponized against those giving it, who are almost always members of marginalized identities. As a parent, I know the desperation, rage, and defeat of being socialized into motherhood. As a therapist, I know the clinical perspective, and also its limitations. As a person from multiple care professions, I know the pressure to give like an open fire hydrant while being told I should be able to survive on my compassion alone. And as a member of those privileged identities, I know our tricks. Which means both that I constantly need to be checking myself and be open to being checked, and also that I can be a challenger of those tricks.

W.I.D.D. (What I Do Differently):

• Elevate care as a leadership practice (versus a practice that exists to make life easier for traditional leaders)

• Center care as a foundational value (versus an invisible background process)

• Teach you how to create care (versus give care without reciprocity)

• Work to de-gender care (versus seeing it as a feminine duty)

• Help you build your business with matriarchal values (versus hierarchical, patriarchal ones)

• Build care-based businesses that thrive off of abundance, sovereignty, and generativity (versus extraction, martyrdom, and exploitation)

• Cultivate community, collaboration, and reciprocity (even if you are a solo provider)

• Work to examine and be a traitor to unearned privileges (versus leveraging them for unearned likeability and trust)

• While being an accomplice to justice-centered culture-making (versus a bystander of the oppressive status quo)

• Use a model of trauma-informed leadership developed from years of practice as a trauma therapist (versus agitating and gaslighting in the name of sales)

• Offer high-touch 1:1 and group services to create a community (versus creating a crowd)

• Start from a strengths-based perspective that you already have most of what you need to thrive (versus starting with “deficits”)

  • (as well as acknowledging that your so-called “deficits” have probably helped you adapt and survive in many brilliant ways)

• Normalize anger and rage as necessary fuel for culture-changing (versus demonizing or weaponizing it)

• Help create your business ecosystem (versus assembly line)

• Nurture attunement and secure attachment with your business (versus being stuck in dysregulation and one-size-fits all blueprints that…don’t fit)

• Believe that your complex and nuanced story is the center line to your values and vision, and should be woven throughout your business in an authentic way (versus performing a role or using an overly simplistic “success narrative”

• Uphold motherhood and caregiving as inspiration and lineage (versus othering and overlooking them as a sign of weakness)

• Toggle between the individual experience and the systemic issues at play (versus solely focusing on the success/failure of the individual and self)

  • …and acknowledge that the system was not designed for people with marginalized identities and that’s why it feels so hard

• Applaud having generations of iterations in your business (versus perpetuating the myth of the linear path and finite end point as success)

• Assume you have caregiving responsibilities in your daily life, which factor into how you engage with your business (versus assume that there is someone else handling that for you)

• Focus on conservation of money, time, energy, and pleasure (versus hoarding, scarcity, and depletion as a virtue)

• Substantiate care-based businesses and caregivers as valued and valuable leaders of our new world (versus paying lip service and stripping away resources).

A Word on My Lineage,

Influences, & Teachers:

In 2017, I saw Gloria Steinem speak when she came to town.  At the end of the event, someone asked her how, with an overwhelming amount of work to do, do we even know where to begin.  

She replied, “Find what hurts.  Start there.”

So my lineage is what hurts- the trauma of one type of female socialization that grows up to then endure the trauma of one type of maternal socialization- both of which dilute and weaponize care.  The boring, day-to-day trauma of disconnection, inadequacy, and extraction that hangs out alongside the deeper cuts.  The tiny arrows of indignancies and the cannonballs of injustice that inform caregiving.  The work of trusting, regulating, finding safety and stability, and being ever in transition, while trying to steward clients through the world while having enough left over for yourself.  

I take comfort in the idea that the work we do now heals several generations that came before, and several that are yet to come.  But my lineage is not just vertical, it is lateral, the unspoken chain links of countless other mothers, daughters, and matriarchs.  My lineage is a funhouse mirror: my child reflecting my shadowy parts back to me, and those parts to my mother, to my grandmother, to my endless line of ancestors.  We are vessels for each other, branded by microchimera glittering like gold in our cell walls.

I am inspired and taught by perinatal mental health, trauma and attachment theory, somatic therapy, trauma-informed yoga, natrescence (h/t Jess Nabb), and cultures that honor matrarchies and matriarchal values/ my coaches Kelly Diels, Danielle Cohen, and Annie Scheussler/Mary Oliver, Adrienne Maree Brown, and Audre Lorde, bell hooks/ my colleagues in Rebel Therapist, We Are the Culture Makers, Decolonizing Therapy, and both consultation groups/the cities of Chicago and New Orleans/ Toi Smith, Ericka Hart, Ebony Donnelley, ShiShi Rose, The Nap Ministry, and ash luna/ Dr. Mara Tesler Stein, Resmaa Menakam, Shawna Murray-Brown, Judith Herman, Bessel van der Kolk, Babette Rothschild, Kimberly Seals Allers, Dr. Kristin Neff, Dr. Sayida Peprah, and Nicole Deggins/Christy Harrison, Sonya Renee Taylor, Sabrina Strings, Alyssa Rumsey, Lindo Bacon, Lucy Aphamor, Sebene Selassie/ Trevia Woods/Tara McMullen/Simone Grace Seol/Roxane Gay, Ijeoma Oluo, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, Amanda Montell.  

My clients: parents who are triumphant, parents who are grieving, parents who are not yet healed and may never fully be, parents who are determined and defeated, parents who are expansive and multitudinous, parents who are quiet and still, scared to make a wrong move.  Parents who are fighting for autonomy and agency. Parents who are angry and dysregulated. Parents who are ferocious in their love, steadfast in their devotion, grieving, guilting, growing, gleaming.  

My lineage is imprinted in big emotions: anger, shame, unyielding determination, and a will to live.  My lineage is exploding, my lineage is numbing.  My lineage is joy and spirit.  My lineage is crazy and lucid.  My lineage is vastness and audacity, with varying results.  My lineage is building, breaking, rebuilding (h/t Carl Sandburg)

To my daughter, Violet Adele

you are my lightning bolt, and I am your sky. You are both what hurts, cracking my world with electric force, and the thing that flashes light on the darkest parts, moving the storm through. I hold all parts of you with me, always, steadfast and true.

This work is about you, for you, and with you, always.

And if you are feeling that this work is about you, for you, and you want it to be with you, there are a few ways we can connect. For those who might want to dip a toe in, you can find me on Instagram @wearethematriarchy, and via email at hello@welcometothematriarchy.