About Us
Gloria Sandford MA, LMHC received her Master’s Degree in Counseling, specializing in Marriage and Family Therapy, from Saint Mary’s University in 1995. Since that time she has worked with a variety of issues concerning adults, children, marital issues, families, and support groups. Gloria is a professional member and trained Parent Facilitator of SENG (Supporting the Emotional Needs of the Gifted) and a Certified Lifespan Integration therapist.
Gloria’s areas of specialty are:
Creativity, Giftedness and Twice-Exceptional dynamics in the Child, Adult, and Family: How they relate to mental health: facilitating a process where each client uses their own strengths and creativity to solve the problems at hand. Providing parenting support, individual and family therapy addressing common gifted and twice-exceptional challenges such as anxiety, perfectionism, executive functioning difficulties, emotional regulation challenges, sensory processing issues, under achievement, existential angst, social anxiety and multipotentiality.
Trauma Therapy: Working with people with a range of traumatic experiences using Lifespan Integration therapy. Transformational healing of memories that block current progress and well-being.
Couples Therapy: Working with partners to recover a sense of intimacy and connection in their relationships. Addressing and creating healthy patterns of emotional attachment
Addiction Issues: Supporting people in recovery as well as educating and supporting their family members. Working with the client to connect them with community support groups and other tools to build healthy boundaries and self-care.
Additional Work: In addition to her private counseling practice, Gloria presents at the national SENG (http://sengifted.org/) conference every year, trains teachers, school psychologists and other professionals on the social and emotional components of giftedness, presents parenting workshops and groups as a SENG certified facilitator and has developed a twice-exceptional parent support group in conjunction with Wally’s Play Groups.
Rachel Elder, MA LMHC, CDPT received her Master’s Degree in Counseling from the Seattle School for Theology and Psychology in Seattle, WA. As a clinician, Rachel has managed a caseload of 50+ clients serving children, adolescents and adults. Rachel has provided individual and group therapy with a focus on Dialectical Behavior Therapy. She has experience being part of a Youth Substance Use Disorder Team. Rachel is certified as an Interpersonal Skills Trainer as well as being certified in Parent-child Interaction Therapy.
Rachel’s areas of specialty are:
Gifted Tweens and Teens and Parenting Support: Supporting the unique social and emotional needs of the gifted youth based upon SENG (Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted) principles.
Premarital Counseling: Using Prepare and Enrich Tools to help guide couples through communication and connection exercises. Helping to grow stronger relationships.
Emotional Regulation and Social Skills: Supporting and growing interpersonal skills for clients with challenges that include anxiety, depression, social distress, isolation, and self-harm.
Addiction Issues: Supporting people in recovering from addictive practices.
Trauma Therapy: Working with people with a range of traumatic experiences using Lifespan Integration therapy.
Preeya Sillan, MA, LMHCA received her Master’s Degree in Counseling Psychology from Northwest University (Kirkland, WA) in 2016. As a mental health clinician, she has worked in schools with children, adolescents and parents to support emotional and behavioral needs and also as a residential therapist with children and their families navigating the foster care system. Preeya has received training in play therapy and trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy.
Preeya‘s areas of specialty are:
Emotional Regulation: Supporting people with intense emotions to accept and express emotions appropriately through mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy
Interpersonal & Communication Skills: Improving the quality of interpersonal relationships and social functioning and deepening connection to others
Anxiety: Identifying and addressing unhelpful thoughts and behaviors and improving mindfulness, grounding and relaxation skills
Trauma Therapy: Working with people with a range of traumatic experiences using TF-CBT
