About

Hi! My name is Hope Merrill, LCSW, and I have been a therapist for the past six years working primarily with adult clients. I have also been a teacher, janitor, chicken plant worker, fast food worker, battered women's advocate, tax preparer and other things over my adult life which have given me a good bit of experience outside of the therapy room. My personal approach to therapy involves helping people recognize their power to find their own solutions to problems. As a therapist, I have found that most people already know, at least on some level, what they need to do to make their lives better in the present and help themselves make peace with the past. Often, though, they are worn down by automatic thoughts and painful emotions that have been repeating in their minds for years, some version of not being good enough, not being strong enough or being damaged beyond help. They feel that they are fighting against overwhelming forces of nature instead of their own thoughts and feelings and believe that there is nothing they can do to change these patterns. Many people depersonalize their future selves, thinking and acting as if that self was a stranger they will never meet in a country they will never visit instead of the self that they already are with a little more time on the clock. My goal in therapy is to help people find their way to be kind to their future selves, get in touch with the values that are truly important to them and reimagine their lives as they would like to live them.

I use both “top down” (talk therapy) and “bottom up” (mindfulness) approaches to help clients recognize and recalibrate their automatic patterns. I use techniques and approaches from various evidenced based practices such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Motivational Interviewing, Dialectic Behavioral Therapy, Schema Therapy, Brainspotting and EMDR.