612-462-3707 julie@2stories.com

sERvices

 

Creating spacious conversations…

Whether you are seeking therapy, need clinical supervision or consultation, or want the most cutting-edge training available for your staff, I will work alongside you every step of the way to achieve your desired outcomes.

Therapy

Therapy with youth

If you’re a parent or responsible adult with a young person in your life, you want them to “have someone to talk to.”  You want to know the young person is safe, respected, and provided a space where they can sort through the stuff that’s making life hard. I offer that space for those conversations.  These are conversations that make new identities possible.

Julie teaching at the University of Maringa in Brazil.

With a background in youth work, experience working with young people at all levels of care, and a deep appreciation of the centrality of pop culture in young people’s lives, I’m uniquely prepared to connect with young people. In fact, I wrote three books about this.

Family therapy and relationship therapy

“Fault” is the F-word and “blame” is the B-word when working relationally.  How about having a conversation where you and the important person/people in your life come together against the problems, rather than having problems that pit you against each other? What if everyone steps into accountability rather than taking the blame? Sound good? Let’s talk!

Queer, trans, & non-binary youth and adults

I am #YourQueerTherapist (Hi! My pronouns are she/her/hers–what are yours?).  More than doing “gay-affirming therapy,” my practice is informed by queer theory.

This means I understand the impact of the gender binary, heteronormativity, homonormativity, and cisnormativity on your identity and your life.  It also means I question the taken-for-granted assumptions our culture imposes about gender, sexuality, sex, relationships, and identity. It means I get that as a parent, nothing in our culture prepared you to have a gender creative 6-year-old or a nonbinary teen.  It also means I’m sex-positive and poly-friendly and won’t freak out if you bring your partners and their partners to a session. This isn’t therapy for queers; it’s therapy that’s queered. Oh, and I wrote three books about this, too.

Julie teaching in Hong Kong.

A Therapist’s Therapist (and a therapist for youth workers)

When you do this work, you want someone who knows the work, and knows it well. Whether or not the stuff of your practice is central to the concerns that bring you to therapy, I appreciate that doing this work is more than just a job.

Generative Conversational Coaching

While you may not be struggling with mental health-related concerns, you may still desire to make some meaningful changes in your life.

If this is the case, generative conversational coaching can be a place that sparks your imagination of what is possible, fosters creative problem-solving for sustainable solutions, and leverages your skills and knowledges toward your preferred ways of showing up in the world.

Here are some of the aspirations people bring to coaching:

  • Cultivate relational skills that center your values and intentions
  • Embody your relational ethics in your personal relationships and community involvement and foster meaningful connections with others
  • Turn insight/awareness into action
  • Imagine and articulate your mission/passion/purpose/vision and foster skills and knowledge that allow you to live into it
  • Construct creative, sustainable, and value-based solutions to respond to problems that create barriers to your preferred identities and ways of being in the world
  • Enhance performance and creativity as an athlete, artist, writer, scholar, etc.

Clinical Supervision and Consultation

Julie facilitating panel discussion on gender at TC9 conference in Vancouver.

If you’re a therapist or youth worker who wants: to learn how to diagnose; write thorough assessments; ignore issues of power and privilege; focus on clients’ “personal choices and responsibility;” and maintain fidelity to a particular evidence-based practice, DO NOT CALL ME.

On the other hand, if you would like to: cultivate your understanding of and skills in narrative approaches; nurture your capacity for self-reflexivity through deliberate practice; develop your practice to support queer and trans folks; enhance your cultural responsiveness and accountability; gain competence in family therapy; and practice relational responsibility and an ethic of care, then BY ALL MEANS CALL ME.

I’m a Minnesota Board of Behavioral Health Therapy Approved Supervisor. I’m committed to making supervision financially accessible and personally supportive

 

Training

Training

I provide custom-made training for your staff on a variety of topics.

Click on the descriptions below to get an idea of some of the workshop topics.

Julie presenting on queer theory at TC10 conference in Vancouver.

Here’s what people say about my workshops:

  • “Accessible”
  • “Brilliant”
  • “Fun & provocative”
  • “Down to earth”
  • “Mind-blowing”
  • “Engaging”
  • “Keeps it real”
  • “Best teacher”
  • “Never get enough”

 

 

 

iYouth: Kids, Counseling & Pop Culture
Through the lens of cultural studies methodologies, Julie will take an alternative look at pop culture’s influence on youth.  By making space for young clients to talk about their relationship with pop culture, Julie will demonstrate conversational practices that afford youth opportunities to engage in meaningful and critical ways with pop culture . The presentation will take a both/and look at pop culture, viewing it as a potential site for productive meaning making and identity development as well as a source of negative influence and reinforcement of limiting identity conclusions and consumer consumption. Therapists will learn to use conceptual and conversational resources from cultural studies that legitimate their engagement with media texts and honor young peoples’ ways of making meaning in the world.
Therapeutic Conversations with Queer Youth
In this engaging and lively workshop Julie will focus on cultivating relationally and culturally responsive practices that bring forward and honor queer young people’s preferred identities. Linking conceptual resources with the craft of question-asking, Julie will help you put queer theory into therapeutic action. Narrative therapy and queer theory will be featured as praxis allies that invite you and your clients into a reflexive and generative relationship with ideas that instigate hopeful resistance to prevailing cultural discourses.
Families in Transition: Transgender Youth in Context
This experiential, practice-based workshop will examine the cultural contexts that influence transgender youth, the important people in their lives, and the therapists that seek to help them.  Participants will be introduced to practices informed by queer theory that honor a proliferation of identity conclusions, respect the need for therapy separate from evaluation, and that challenge conventional ideas and practices about working with transgender youth and families.
Fire Up! Battle “Burnout” by Rekindling the Flame: Re-claiming Your Mission
A well-received and very happy-making workshop for therapists, educators, and social service providers, Fire Up! invites participants to re-claim, re-discover, and re-member why they are in the field they chose, what they bring to it, when they are at their best, what others most value about them, and what it is that can keep them going—individually and as a team.  This is a generative process that privileges the stories and knowledge of the participants.  In this interactive, experiential, and hope-full workshop, participants will tell and hear stories that reconnect them back to their passion and purpose while also clearing a way to the future.
Staying Connected & Constructing Possibilities: How to not be the Man with Youth
Julie will facilitate an interactive and practice-based workshop that introduces participants to ideas and practices that encourage generative, culturally resonant, and responsive conversations between youth and the adults that work alongside them.  Drawing on ideas from constructionist philosophy, post-structural and queer theories, cultural studies methodologies, anti-oppressive practices, and liberatory education, she will provide opportunities to try on practices that position helpers as conversational partners with young people.

Let's Start a Conversation

julie@2stories.com

612-462-3707

Believe me—I can talk a lot of dense theory and carry on about a lot of big effing ideas— but that’s not what you’re here for, and this isn’t about me, it’s about you and your life. It’s my job to *get* you and respond to you on your terms, in your terms.

I begin every relationship with potential clients with a brief phone call (there’s no fee or obligation).