About

about compass rose therapy & inquiry

Dedicated to Helping You Navigate Toward Inner Guidance and Healing

Are you losing faith in your ability to manage the conflicts life presents? Does it feel as if your relationships, your health, or your capacity to create the life you desire are crumbling rather than evolving? Do you or one of your family members struggle with multiple diagnoses, and the experience that crisis feels never ending?

Imagine feeling equipped to handle the heavy pressures of confronting change with more grace and direction. Compass Rose Therapy and Inquiry is here to help you reconnect with the aspects of yourself that foster growth so you can reclaim a grounded relationship to your unique insight, and develop the new habits that guide and create significant change.

Compass Rose Therapy and Inquiry uses an integrative approach, identifying and implementing relevant evidence based practices, including recent understanding of psychology and neuroscience. These orientations are used on a backdrop of depth psychotherapy, a way of understanding human experience that is driven by exploring  unconscious or shadow aspects of self. Depth psychotherapy examines the parts of who we are that seek broad expression through our persistent obstacles, our passions, our faith, our traumas and our stories, as well as our cultural beliefs, and the wide variety strategies we use to connect with the world around us. We implement approaches that include awareness of emotions and embodied experience, we remain curious about dreams and imagination, as they are key to understanding the unique inner life we all harbor. We use object relations, family systems, and attachment based orientations to reorganize family and couple relationships, breaking down repetitive dysfunction and reintegrating an ability to feel connection again. We often forget that some of most important end goals of therapy are revitalized joy, curiosity, and playfulness.

As the recovery process unfolds, feelings of loneliness begin to subside and a mutual healing is often possible within our most important relationships, therefore positively affecting our community.  We are experienced in working with individuals, couples and families from diverse backgrounds including a variety of ethnicities and within LGBTQ population.

Andrea’s Approach

When it comes to serious challenges with mental health, it is often said that the most important aspect of this deep, reflective work is the relationship between client and therapist. I create a nurturing, nonjudgemental safe space for us to explore and help you reconnect with your inner compass, your insight and intuition, the crucial parts of you that are so often shut down when mental health struggles are a chronic problem. I use a depth psychological approach that includes careful attunement to somatic expressions of suffering, attention to healing relational ruptures, grief, and a variety of the traumas life can present. Incorporating the wisdom of the unconscious, the body, and the imagination makes our work together a rich exploration of authentic self that addresses wounds at their root, while attuning to the unique recovery that is guided by each individual, couple, or family I am working with. My approach is Jungian based, and uses the vast map of human experience including the arts, myth, and spirituality to help excavate and revision what healing is as a lived experience. As this occurs, relationships also tend to experience healing, thus reminding us that our own healing navigates us back to the interconnected web of experience in which we all play a vital role.

Andrea’s Experience

I have been drawn to the vocation of healing and health since my childhood. Growing up with parents who loved literature, visual arts, and music, I naturally developed a passion for these types of expression as well. Acting as a steward of nature and human rights also became important for me as a young person, and some of my first work was as a fundraiser for non-profit advocacy groups such as Greenpeace and Siera Club, Unicef and Amnesty International, Sothern Poverty Law Center, and Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. As I matured, my work life followed the course of these interests in healing, the humanities, and stewardship, and this has continued across the various chapters of my life. As well, I have intermittently worked with at risk youth and teens in theatre, in environmental and arts education, and in psychotherapy.

The early foundations of my practice as a psychotherapist took place in community mental health for families, partial hospitalization for adolescents, and residential anxiety focused treatment for adolescents and their families. I have also worked in outpatient clinical settings and am currently in private practice. This experience has given me the opportunity to work with people from a wide variety of backgrounds economically, culturally, as well as across age and ethnicity demographics.

While a great deal of my practice has focused on youth and families, I enjoy individual and couples work immensely. I have often been told I have a blunt or direct approach, which I see as an important bridge helping those who work with me feel seen in their challenges, while creating direct routes to honesty in the therapy experience. I have often received the feedback that my intuitive abilities are powerful, and clients frequently express an experience that I understand how their journey has felt. This is an honor, and it also a skill that I find is largely absent for Westerners in their relationship to themselves. Rebuilding our unique compass for our intuition and insight is one of the primary aims of Compass Rose Therapy & Inquiry. Carl Jung discussed the need to know oneself deeply as the precursor to effectively collaborate with our communities. In analyzing the problems of his times, and observing the psychological tendencies during both WWI and WWII, he identified that those who lack a sense of individuality are prone to falling toward the unhealthy, damaging types of group think that can create obeyance instead of the ability to respond uniquely, soulfully, and courageously to the trials of life.

In my current practice, I encourage liberation from thinking that creates limitation and increased suffering. I often work with creative, reflective people, and enjoy helping these qualities blossom in the various developmental stages of life, such as adolescence, midlife, and the threshold of elder experience, as well as in the context of interpersonal relationships, and diverse expressions of sexuality.

My long history in complementary health care as a body worker, yogi, teacher, and wellness resort manager made the transition to working in mental health seamless in the sense that I have had a long commitment to health, injury recovery, and development of the healing relationship between body and psyche. I have over 25000 hours of experience working one on one with others to help alleviate pain and create solutions that improve movement.

In addition to providing health care for nearly 30 years, I have pursued work in film and television, as well as environmental and arts education for youth. I have participated as a social media coordinator and blogger for the Jung Society of Utah. I continue to write and create visual art to feed the muses in my free time. I adore traveling and soaking up the experience of other cultures, and I have lived and practice outside the mainland US, on the Micronesian island of Guam.

Working with animals is something I have come to love, and I am currently training a therapy dog, Stormy  – she is an enchanting red husky. My current goals include continuing to move toward equine assisted therapies, as well as adding collaborators to the Compass Rose team. I am most energized by feeling I am in sync with the rhythms of nature, and can be found soaking up the scents of the Earth whenever possible. I currently live in Utah with my three fur babies.

What we treat

  • Anxiety and Depression
  • Trauma and Abuse
  • OCD, ADHD, other dual diagnosis
  • Life transitions
  • Interpersonal failures and relationship ruptures
  • Crisis, Grief, and Loss
  • Mood Disorders and Personality disorders
  • Adolescent issues; including adapting to life after intensive treatment
  • Marital Concerns
  • Parenting Problems
  • Family Dysfunction
  • Creative Blocks and Growth Targets
  • Medical Trauma & Chronic Illness
  • Sexuality and Gender conflicts

“Once we have learned to live with our feelings and not to fight against them, we see in the manifestations of our bodies not a danger but helpful indications about our own personal history.”

― Alice Miller