Addiction & Dual Diagnosis Counseling for Adults
Before anything else: you don't have to be ready to quit to talk to me.
That's the thing most people are checking for when they land on a page like this. Whether they'll be handed a commitment before they've even said what's going on. You won't be.
Most people who reach out are somewhere in the middle. You've cut back before and it held for a while. You've had the conversation with yourself at 6am about how tonight's going to be different. Maybe someone in your life has started counting, or you've started hiding the counting. Maybe nothing has fallen apart yet and you're not sure that means anything.
Addiction is also rarely the whole story. For a lot of adults, substance use is wrapped around depression, anxiety, trauma, or undiagnosed ADHD — what's called dual diagnosis, or co-occurring disorders. Treating only one side usually explains why the last attempt didn't hold. Drinking stops and the anxiety it was managing doesn't, so the drinking comes back, and now there's shame on top of it.
With over 21 years of clinical experience, I work on both at once: what's driving the use, and what a life looks like that doesn't need it.
My Clinical Approach
I don't run a program. There isn't a curriculum you'll be walked through, or a set of steps you'll be measured against.
What I do is start from an honest question: what is the substance doing for you? Because it's doing something. It's quieting something, or making something bearable, or filling a space that's otherwise hard to sit in. Until we know what it's for, taking it away just leaves the original problem in the room with fewer tools to handle it.
That's why I work on both sides at once. If the drinking is holding down anxiety, then the anxiety is part of the treatment. If it started after something happened that you've never really looked at, the looking is part of it too. Treating one and not the other is usually the reason a previous attempt didn't hold — and why the relapse felt like a character failure when it was actually a gap in the plan.
I'll also ask what you actually want, and take the answer seriously. Motivation that comes from someone else's ultimatum tends to last about as long as the ultimatum. Motivation that comes from something you care about — a relationship, work you want back, a version of your life you can still picture — holds up better under pressure. Part of my job is helping you find that version and keep it in view when things get hard.
For some people, trauma is underneath all of it. I'm trained in EMDR, an approach that works with how traumatic memory is stored and doesn't require you to narrate the worst of it in detail. It can take the charge out of things that have been driving the use for years.
I've been doing this for over 21 years. I'm a Licensed Professional Counselor and a Certified Professional Counselor Supervisor, which means I also train and oversee other therapists, and a Certified Mental Health Forensic Examiner. Sessions are online, through a secure platform, for adults in Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, Vermont, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Minnesota.
If You’re Already Sober
Not everyone who comes to me is trying to stop. Some have been sober for years.
Sobriety solves the drinking. It doesn't automatically repair a marriage that spent six years bracing for impact, or a sibling who stopped picking up the phone, or the problem of what to do with anger now that there's nothing to pour on it. Some people find the hardest part starts once the substance is gone.
If you're in a program that works, keep it — I'm not competing with it. This is the other work: the relationships, the patterns underneath the using, and the parts of yourself that got postponed.
What I Treat
Alcohol Use Disorder
Opioid and Prescription Drug Dependency
Cannabis Use Disorder
Cocaine Use Disorder
Co-Occurring Depression and Substance Use
Co-Occurring Anxiety and Substance Use
Co-Occurring ADHD and Substance Use
Trauma-Driven Substance Use
Recovery Maintenance
What I’m Not Going To Do
I'm not going to require abstinence before you can start. I'm not going to make you say the word "alcoholic." I'm not going to run a program you fit yourself into. I’m also not going to require that you start attending a 12-step program, or tell you not to attend a program that is working well for you.
What I will do is ask honest questions about what the substance is doing for you — because it's doing something, or you'd have stopped — and help you decide what you actually want. If that turns out to be quitting, we'll work on quitting. If it turns out to be cutting back, or figuring out whether there's a problem at all, we'll work on that.
One limit: If you're physically dependent — if you get sick when you don't drink or use, particularly with alcohol or opioids — please see a doctor before starting therapy. Alcohol withdrawal can be dangerous and needs medical supervision. That's not a door closing. It's a different door, and the right one first.
If The Person You’re Worried About is Someone Else
You know the sound of their car in the driveway, and you know what it means when you don't hear it.
Not everyone who reaches out about addiction is the one using. Parents, partners, adult children, siblings — people who have spent years managing someone else's crisis, absorbing the fallout, and holding a family together while it happens. If that's you, you don't need a diagnosis and you don't need your person's permission to get support of your own.
I work with family members individually. Not as a way to fix the person using, and not as family therapy, but as therapy for you: the exhaustion, the grief, the anger you're not supposed to feel, the sleep you're not getting, and the question of where you end and their addiction begins.
Boundaries are usually part of it. So is the guilt that follows them. So is the fact that you may love someone whose choices you cannot control, and that both halves of that are true at once.
If you've been wondering whether it's selfish to get help when you're not the one with the problem: it isn't. You've been carrying this too.
You don't have to wait for them to get help before you do.