Mindfulness-based, experiential, relational
Clinical Supervision & Consultation
for
Early & mid-career relational therapists
in Oregon, Washington, and Illinois
Helping you build steadier clinical presence, sharper decision making, and a stronger self-of-the-therapist— so you can feel more grounded, confident, and effective in the room—especially when things get difficult.
You’re Doing Good Work — And It Still Feels Hard Sometimes
You care deeply about your clients. You’ve done the trainings. You can explain attachment, trauma, and nervous system activation. You know how to conceptualize. You understand that “symptoms” are often survival. And still… the room can pull you.
In couples work, the system escalates fast—two nervous systems, two attachment strategies, one shared field that shifts in seconds. One phrase lands as threat, the cycle takes over, and suddenly you’re holding blame, shutdown, despair, longing, and urgency—at the same time.
You’re trying to stay with it, but you can feel your own system respond:
I need to get this under control.
I need to land something that helps.
If I miss this, I’ll lose the room.
Why can’t I find the intervention fast enough?
And if you work cross-culturally, the field gets even more layered. Family duty. Immigration stress. Intergenerational expectations. Racialized experience. Language nuance. Power. Values. What’s “respect” to one person feels like “erasure” to another. You’re tracking attachment and the cycle—and also asking yourself: How do I name culture and power without collapsing the session or shaming anyone? Sometimes you feel that tiny internal pause… that subtle shutdown… right when you most want to be clear.
In individual work, it’s a different pull—but it can be just as strong.
The client is brilliant. Insightful. Self-aware. They can talk about their feelings for forty-five minutes without feeling a single feeling. The session turns into analysis, philosophy, story, debate. You find yourself nodding along in a “smart conversation,” and somewhere inside you’re thinking: We’re orbiting the moon, but we’re not landing.
Or the client is depressed, shut down, fells to the familiar fog and you can feel your own anxiety rise. As the silence stretches and the hopelessness fills the room. A part of you feel the urge to get them to do something, give them a next step. You find yourself anxiously thinking: “If they leave like this, did I fail them?” “ What if they don’t get better?” Then you swoop in, searching for one fast enough fix for them.
And afterward you find yourself sitting with that familar restlessness and that ache: I was working so hard… but did we actually touch the place that needs care?
Or perhaps you sense the tender opening —the moment that could become transformational—
and then the client laughs, intellectualizes, reframes, jokes, or becomes “the good client.”
And you wonder if you pushed too hard… or didn’t push at all. You find yourself wondering:
“Am I helping them change—or helping them stay protected in a more sophisticated way?”
If you’re nodding along, you’re not alone. This isn’t incompetence. This is what happens when you do real relational work—especially with couples, high-functioning individuals, and cross-cultural complexity. And it’s exactly the kind of work supervision is meant to hold with you.
Goals of Clinical Supervision / Consultation
Multicultural counseling can be a valuable resource for individuals navigating the complexities of diverse cultural backgrounds. This counseling approach is sensitive to the myriad ways culture shapes our experiences, beliefs, and behaviors. It acknowledges the importance of understanding a client's cultural context and incorporates this into the therapeutic process
With mindfulness-based, AEDP-informed supervision & consultation, I will help you strengthen your clinical effectiveness while deepening your capacity to stay present—with clients, with intensity, and with yourself.
This is a space to bring in:
the couples dynamic that escalate quickly or collapse into hopelessness
the individuals dynamic where intellect, people-pleasing, dissociation, or “functioning” take control.
the cross-cultural nuances you don’t want to flatten into “communication issues”
the moments you felt pulled off-center: urgency, rescue, irritation, shame, freezing, over-responsibility
Together, we will support you to:
Track moment-to-moment process (affect, defenses, bids for connection, rupture/repair)
Clarify your clinical map in real time (what matters now, what can wait, where the opening is)
Shift from insight to experience—so sessions move from “talking about feelings” to feeling, processing, and integrating.
Work with countertransference as information rather than a verdict on competence
Build nervous-system steadiness so you lead from groundedness—not urgency or frustration
Integrate culture, power, and context without losing clinical momentum.
Hello there. Welcome!
I am May, an LMFT and AAMFT Approved Supervisor, I specialize in relational work, cross-cultural individuals, and complex relationship dynamics.
I understand the kind of care you bring into the room—the care that makes you replay sessions later and quietly carry your clients with you. I also understand the pressure of being the one who’s “supposed to know,” because as a fellow therapist and a human being, I understand the deep longing underneath it: to feel grounded. to trust myself. to know I’m good enough.
Scroll down to learn more about May as a Supervisor
ABOUT ME
I believe supervision can be both deeply supportive and clinically rigorous. Not authoritative . Not shaming. Not “let tell me what you missed.” But a space where your growth edges are treated with respect, care and understanding.
I am an AAMFT approved supervisor and also an Oregon board registered supervisor.
If you’re early career, I’ll help you build a foundation: pacing, structure, and a strong relational stance for both individual and couples work.
If you’re mid-career, I’ll help you refine the subtleties: tracking micro-moments, deepening experiential work, integrating cultural complexity, and strengthening the self-of-the-therapist so you can do this work with steadiness and longevity.
My Approach to Supervision: Relational + Experiential + Practical
When you meet with me, we start by establishing what many therapists don’t get enough of: a supervisory relationship that feels safe, collaborative, and real.
From there, we slow things down and get precise.
This supervision is relational and experiential—not just case-management or problem solving. That means we will look at:
what is happening in the client/couple (affect, defenses, bids, rupture/repair)
what is happening in you (activation, protectors, shame narratives, urgency, avoidance)
what is happening between you (pulls to rescue, align, perform, fix, withdraw)
what is happening in the wider field (culture, power, gender, race, immigration, family roles, systems)
I ’ll work with your clinical material in a way that’s tangible and usable. That might look like:
slowing down a session moment and naming the sequence of moves
identifying where affect wanted to deepen—and what interrupted it
sharpening language so interventions land with less “explaining” and more impact
practicing alternatives: how to respond when a client intellectualizes, debates, deflects, collapses, or people-pleases
tracking how your nervous system responds (speeding up, numbing out, over-functioning) and building more choice in your stance
using recordings when appropriate and ethically permitted to train micro-skills and timing
My aim is attentiveness without shame: clear feedback, real skill-building, and a steady container that helps you learn with less worry, more clarity.
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Because being a therapist is also a career—often an entrepreneurial one—this can also be a place to talk about your career development. If you’re growing a private practice, we can bring the business questions into supervision too. I can support you with both tangible strategy and deeper clarity: finding your values, shaping your niche, growing a flourishing practice. I am particular experienced in helping people build a successful private pay practice so that folks can feel both good for the work they do and being able to support their family in a sustainable way.
Signs You Could Benefit From Supervision / Consultation
Consider seeking consultation if:
you feel confident in individual work, but couples sessions escalate quickly
you’re strong conceptually, but sessions feel stuck or repetitive
you notice intellectualization, debate, or “smart talk” hijacking the work
you feel pulled into being a coach/cheerleader—and you want more depth and relational change
you struggle to pace intensity: too deep too fast, or too safe for too long
you want to strengthen experiential interventions (enactments, emotion work, rupture/repair)
you work cross-culturally and want consultation grounded in cultural humility and clinical precision
you want self-of-the-therapist support: shame, perfectionism, urgency, over-responsibility, avoidance
you want clients to experience therapy as something that changes them, not just something they “understand”
Or you might also be looking for support on the business and career side of being a therapist:
you’re in private practice (or building one) and feel like you’re making it up as you go
you want to refine your niche and messaging so the right clients can actually find you
you want a caseload that fits your nervous system—less depletion, more meaningful, sustainable work
you’re unsure about pricing, policies, consultation calls, referrals, or how to create steadier income
you want to build work-life balance as a therapist-entrepreneur—so your practice serves your life, not the other way around
Imagine leaving sessions with a clearer internal compass, knowing how to respond when a individual client goes intellectual—not by forcing emotion, but by creating space for deepening. Imagine cultivating heart felt moments with your couple that facilitate connection, intimacy and a sense of being seen.
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AEDP-informed supervision is attachment-based and experience-near. In plain terms: we don’t just talk about what happened—we work with what’s happening, in real time, as it shows up in your clinical material and in you.
AEDP informed supervision tends to be especially helpful if you’re noticing patterns like:
The session stays in narrative and meaning, but the client can’t access emotion safely.
You and the client end up in a highly intelligent conversation that’s informative—but not transformative.
The client’s intellect becomes a “protector,” and you’re not sure how to honor it and invite something deeper.
You feel pulled into being the coach, cheerleader, or productivity partner—and you miss the relational field.
Your interventions are “good,” but they land as content rather than lived experience.
You’re trying to “go deeper,” but the client collapses, jokes, argues, dissociates, or performs insight.
In AEDP informed techinique, we track “green signals” (openings toward resonance, emotion that’s ready to move, authentic contact) and “red signals” (anxiety, shutdown, urgency, shame, over-intellectualizing). These signals help us read the room better to help clients slow down, regulate, deepen, and consolidate.
Specialties
At Spark Relational Counseling, I believe supervision should be both supportive and practical—warm enough that you can be real, and useful enough that you leave with clarity and confidence. Here are some of the areas we can focus on together:
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Working with intellectualization, perfectionism, people-pleasing, shame, dissociation, and “high-functioning stuckness.” We’ll practice how to gently honor protectors without colluding with them, and how to shift sessions from insight and narrative into embodied experience—so “knowing” becomes “felt change.” This often includes tracking moment-to-moment cues (tone, breath, gaze, shifts in aliveness) and finding the exact hinge points where the work either deepens or detours.
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Attunement, dyadic regulation, timing, language, and metaprocessing—so reparative moments emerge and consolidate. We’ll focus on building the conditions where clients can risk something new in relationship (being seen, being met, being accompanied through core affect), and then helping them stay with the experience long enough for it to actually land. This is also where we refine the difference between reassurance and transformation.
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Session pacing, cycle tracking, attachment-informed interventions, and how to lead when escalation or shutdown takes over. We’ll work on how to keep both partners in the room, how to avoid getting pulled into triangulation, and how to decide—quickly—whether the next move is regulation, enactment, reframing, or repair. You’ll build a repeatable structure that helps you feel steadier even when the couple is not.
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Repairing alliance ruptures with clients and couples—and using repair as a transformational moment. We’ll look at early rupture signals (subtle withdrawal, compliance, irritation, sudden “flatness”), and practice language for owning impact without over-explaining or collapsing. When repair happens well, it becomes one of the most corrective experiences therapy can offer—and supervision can help you trust yourself enough to stay with it.
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Working with therapist protectors: over-functioning, urgency, freezing, self-criticism, “performing competence,” and burnout risk—so your presence becomes steadier and more effective. We’ll identify your most common pulls in the room (rescuing, pleasing, over-directing, getting “too smart,” going blank), and build more choice—so you can return to grounded leadership instead of running on adrenaline.
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Integrating culture, power, identity, immigration stress, intergenerational dynamics, and family roles without losing therapeutic depth. We’ll explore how to name cultural context with humility and precision, how to track the ways power and safety shape attachment strategies, and how to work with difference without either avoiding it or over-focusing on it. The goal is a clinical stance that feels both ethically grounded and emotionally resonant.
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With consent and ethical handling, we slow down real moments to train micro-skills, timing, and in-the-room presence. Reviewing recordings can help you see what you can’t see in real time: micro-ruptures, missed “green signals,” shifts in affect, and the moments where one small pivot could have changed the arc of the session. You’ll leave with concrete alternative interventions you can try immediately.
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Rarely do we get real training on the business side of therapy—how to make a living while staying grounded in the work you love. If you want to build a sustainable, healthy private practice, I can be your guide: offering tangible strategies (positioning, referrals, consultation calls, policies, pricing, systems) while also helping you clarify your values, niches, and clinical identity so your caseload fits you—not the other way around. We’ll focus on building a practice that supports your nervous system: work-life balance, capacity planning, and the long-game mindset of being a therapist and an entrepreneur, so you can feel both rejuvenated and financially steady.
Professional Background:
Approved Clinical Supervisor from American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT).
Board Certified Supervisor from Oregon Board of Licensed Professional Counselors and Therapists
M.S Master of Science – Northwestern University
Clinical training with The Family Institue at Bette D. Harris Family & Child Clinic
Chair at The Family Institute at Northwestern University Alumni Advisory Board- Diversity Committee
Clinical Fellow of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT).
Selected panelist with Chicago Minds, Break the Silence: Challenges with East Asian Mental Health Representation in America
Common Questions
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This is clinical supervision/consultation — NOT therapy. If you’re pre-licensed, our work is supervision (structured oversight and support for your clinical development); if you’re fully licensed, our work is consultation (professional support to deepen skill, decision-making, and self-of-the-therapist).
AEDP-informed supervision can feel relational and experiential—because we’ll track your in-the-room experience, your reactions, and the supervisory relationship as part of the learning—but the purpose is different from therapy. We’re digging in personal healing work for its own sake; we’re using what shows up in service of your clinical effectiveness, If deeper personal material emerges, we “bookmark” it, encourage you to explore more in your personal therapy. What’s important is that we keep the focus on what will help you practice with more steadiness and precision.
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Both—and it’s tailored to what you need. If you need stronger conceptual clarity, we’ll slow down and sharpen formulation: attachment patterns, defenses, cycle dynamics, cultural context, and what’s driving stuckness. If you need more in-the-room skill, we’ll focus on technique: timing, language, pacing, experiential interventions, and what to do when a client intellectualizes, collapses, escalates, or goes compliant. And if you need both (most therapists do), we’ll weave them together so your next move is clinically sound and usable in real time.
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When appropriate, with client consent and ethical handling, yes. Recording review can accelerate growth by training the micro-moments that change outcomes. We’ll slow down to notice subtle shifts—tone, breath, gaze, timing, rupture signals—and translate those observations into concrete clinical choices. Most therapists find this turns “I think I know what happened” into “I can see exactly what to do next.”
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We’ll decide frequency together based on your needs and my supervising responsibilities. If I am your primary supervisor (meaning I’m holding legal responsibility for your clinical work), I require weekly meetings for the first 4–6 months, and then we can transition to biweekly as your foundation stabilizes. If I’m a secondary supervisor or I’m working with you as a consultant, we can choose a cadence that matches your goals and offers more flexibility—weekly, biweekly, monthly, or short-term intensives around complex cases. The aim is a rhythm that supports growth without adding unnecessary pressure.
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Clinical supervision/consultation is typically private pay. We can share rates and options during the consultation call. Many therapists choose consultation as a professional development investment, especially when they’re building couples competence, refining depth work, or navigating complex cultural dynamics. If you need documentation for professional reimbursement or tax purposes, we can discuss what’s appropriate.
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A clinical consultant helps you strengthen your clinical work through focused reflection, case strategy, skill-building, and support around the therapist’s internal process. I help you see patterns you might miss in the moment—both in the client system and in the relational field between you. Consultation is collaborative: we identify what’s stuck, clarify what matters most right now, and refine interventions you can take directly into your next session. It’s not about “grading” you—it’s about helping you grow faster and feel steadier.
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Therapy consultation typically consists of reviewing a case (or a specific session moment), mapping the underlying patterns (cycle, defenses, attachment needs, cultural context), and identifying practical next steps. We often slow down to track what was happening in you as the therapist—because that’s where many of the most important clinical decisions get made. Depending on your needs, consultation can include role-plays, language practice, and—when appropriate—video/audio review. You should leave with clearer conceptualization and concrete interventions to try.
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Clinical consultation is a professional support space where therapists bring clinical questions, challenges, and growth goals to an experienced clinician. It can be ongoing or short-term and focused (for example, around a specific case type like high-conflict couples, shame-based depression, or intellectualization). Consultation is especially helpful when you want to deepen your work beyond “general supervision” into refinement: timing, presence, relational leverage, and how to facilitate corrective emotional experience. It’s also a place to strengthen self-of-the-therapist—so you can work with more steadiness and less burnout.
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An AAMFT Approved Supervisor is a clinician who has met specific training, experience, and competency standards set by the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy. This designation indicates specialized preparation to provide supervision to MFT trainees and relational therapists and to support clinical development in a structured, ethical way. Requirements can include supervision-specific training, documented supervision hours, and ongoing adherence to AAMFT standards. If you are pursuing licensure or need AAMFT-recognized supervision, we can discuss fit and how those requirements apply to your situation.
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Step 1.
Fill out the contact form and share your stage of practice (pre-licensed or licensed), your primary population, and what you want from supervision.
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Step 2.
Hear back from us within 24-48 hours (except for weekends and holidays).
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Step 3.
Schedule supervision/consultation and begin building steadier presence, sharper clinical choices, and a more confident therapist self.
You don’t have to grow in isolation.
Other mental health services offered at Spark Relational Counseling.
Culturally sensitive therapy can be a valuable resource for your need. In addition, we understand your needs for support don’t usually fit into one box. At Spark Relational Counseling, we offer a variety of mental health services. We provide online therapy for anxiety in Washington, Oregon and Illinois. For individuals with struggles in anxiety, we offer anxiety treatment at our Portland anxiety clinic. For professionals, working women with concerns around dating and intimacy, we offer individual therapy for loneliness (dating therapy, for example) that helps you feel more confident in building a strong romantic relationship. Additionally, for those in a relationship. we specialize in couples therapy and marriage counseling and premarital counseling. If you are a small business owner, we offer therapy for entrepreneurs to help you navigate the ups and downs of owning a business. Whatever your mental health needs may be, we are here to help.