Chris has 26 years of diverse experience in the criminal justice, court, mediation, teaching, counseling, group facilitating, writing, and hospice fields. A native Minnesotan, she graduated with her masters in social work from Augsburg College in 2002. She spent 2008-2018 in Colorado and moved to Duluth after a long stint running a non profit marriage counseling retreat center seeing couples in crisis and doing premarriage counseling. In Colorado she and her husband specialized in marriage counseling and she is co-author of a marriage book. She was head therapist at a domestic and sexual violence crisis center and worked closely with the community to educate the spiritual community about sexual and domestic trauma. She is a licensed Minister and loves to officiate weddings. She is trained in the Prepare/ Enrich tool which helps couples identify their areas of growth and strength.

Her specialties are deeply important to Chris and include; marriage counseling involving complex barriers to intimacy including affairs and addiction, helping persons with domestic/sexual abuse trauma begin to heal, and helping those spiritually traumatized by religious abuses, and lastly grief support and counseling. She has a profoundly personal connection to chronic illness and caregiver fatigue; as well as passion to use her clinical skills to strengthen, teach and help those facing chronic illness. Her approach includes the use of attachment theory to explore emotions and core hurts, and reconnect couples and help individuals work through their barriers to intimacy. She also utilizes psychoanalytic theory-exploring inner dialogue and subconscious drives; narrative therapy- understanding the stories we tell ourselves and how we live those stories out, as well as process therapy- helping people connect to their consciousness in deeper ways and live more intentionally. Her passion is for intensives where we can spend more time identifying patterns and writing a new way forward. To Chris, the whole person matters. The past, present and future are all relevant to developing treatment plans that bring lasting change. Chris loves all adventures outside, a riveting TV series, reading books, hearty dialogue, and most especially living life with her best friend, their two girls; son and his wife and her granddaughter. Chris is the cofounder of Inner Frontiers an experiential women's company dedicated to women's attachment healing through travel and adventure.