Sherilynn M. Allen, MSW, LCSW, obtained a Master’s degree in Social Work with an emphasis in leadership and development in social services, from Loyola University in Chicago and her Bachelor’s degree in liberal arts from Chicago State University in Chicago. She is also a certified mediator through the Chicago Center for Conflict Resolution.
Sherilynn participated in a robust post-graduate fellowship through Cathedral Counseling Center in Chicago and has engaged in advanced clinical training in trauma-focused care, through the Chicago Center for Integration and Healing, and dialectical behavioral therapy. Her experience includes providing corporate crisis grief counseling and debriefing services in the aftermath of critical stress incidents, working with gambling addiction, and working with both individuals across the lifespan with an array of presenting concerns and with couples in a variety of relational experiences.
Sherilynn describes herself as a solution-focused optimist and considers it an honor to support her clients’ mental and emotional well-being, growth, and healing. Sherilynn enjoys getting to know her clients, developing a strong therapeutic relationship anchored in trust, and using what is already working in their lives as a solid foundation to build upon. She supports clients in working through the impact of systems of oppression and approaches her work from a social justice lens. Sherilyn also incorporates faith and spirituality when requested. Some areas of focus in Sherilynn’s work include anxiety, depression, racial concerns, experiences of oppression, grief and loss, caretaking for loved ones, parenting, and working with older adults.
Jack Lionberger is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker who earned his master’s degree from the University of Chicago’s Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice where he was a member of a program of study that focused on the newest forms of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).
Jack enjoys working with both individuals and couples, and draws most from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT). Jack takes an approach that looks beyond diagnoses, and explores the larger patterns and processes of behavior and thinking that get in the way of people’s lives and relationships. He believes that challenges like conflict, uncertainty, worry, sadness, anger, grief, loss and more, are the natural outcomes of being alive, and often contain important information for what matters most to us.
Jack has extensive clinical experience in community mental health, inpatient psychiatry, and working with frontline and healthcare workers. He has a proven record of helping people who experience acute anxiety, OCD, suicidality, PTSD, moral injury, addiction, interpersonal difficulties, chronic pain, death and grief, and more. Beyond any one theory, Jack believes that therapy should focus on a client’s values and strengths to help them get closer to a life that is authentic and purpose driven; he makes it his mission to show up to every therapy session with empathy, authenticity, care, and humor.
In his personal life Jack enjoys simple pleasures like cooking, baking, good coffee, playing bass, time with his dog, eating pizza, and beach days.
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Aetna Medicare Advantage
BCBS PPO
BCBS HMO (Site 475 and 489), BCBS HMO Medicare Advantage (Site 475 and 489)
Humana
Medicare
Optum/United Healthcare
Hannah provides clinical therapeutic services to individuals and couples. She is warm, compassionate and eager to partner with clients. Hannah uses a strengths-based approach and believes in the power of therapeutic relationships. It is a goal of hers to listen and understand clients and help them learn appropriate coping skills that can help them outside of the therapy session. She understands the courage it takes to ask for help.
Hannah is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker. She earned her Masters of Arts from The University of Chicago, The School of Social Service Administration, where she was awarded the Brinks Fellowship in Family Support. For over 15 years, she has provided clinical services to individuals, families and couples. Hannah’s areas of expertise include working with individuals or couples impacted by infertility, high-risk pregnancies, grief and loss, parenting challenges, working through life-stage and career transitions, and experiencing depression and anxiety.
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Aetna Medicare Advantage
BCBS PPO
BCBS HMO (Site 475 and 489)
Humana
Medicare
Optum/United Healthcare
Sacha is a Licensed Marriage and Family therapist who believes healthy relationships are the stepping stones to healing, processing, and understanding not only each other but also ourselves. While utilizing Gottman, emotion-focused, strategic, and experiential approaches, she seeks to create a space for clients to feel safe in their therapeutic process. She also provides a space for couples to reconnect, rebuild, and redefine their relationship at each stage of their lives.
Sacha acknowledges each client’s experiences as their own while providing a systemic perspective to assist them in their process to self-discovery. She has experience with guiding both individuals and couples through life transitions, anxiety, depression, relational challenges, and emotional healing. Sacha often works closely with clients to build skills around communication, healthy boundaries, and interpersonal relationships. She understands for people to process life’s challenges they need to experience a supportive, earnest, and genuine environment. Sacha provides that with empathy, cultural sensitivity, humor and a deep care for human nature.
Aetna
BCBS PPO
BCBS HMO (Site 475 and 489) Humana
Optum/United Healthcare
Deanna earned her Master of Arts in Social Work at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and a Bachelor’s in Theatre from New York University. Prior to coming to LifePath, Deanna worked in community-based mental health treating violence intervention and prevention, child welfare, crisis intervention, LGBTQ+ identities and their intersections, foster care and adoption, grief and loss, complex trauma, and intensive outpatient treatment.
Deanna believes a person’s identity, values and beliefs guide their path of healing. Therapy can be a way of liberating ourselves from limiting ideas, societal messages, oppression and isolation. Deanna sees the client as the expert in their experience and collaborates with them to develop a space to learn and grow. Her therapeutic approach is both systemic and person-centered with a focus on inherent strengths and resilience. Deanna pulls from relational, attachment, family systems, racial trauma and polyvagal theories while using such modalities as ACT, DBT, CBT, TCI-F and Motivational Interviewing. She also draws, when appropriate, from her own life experiences.
Deanna’s peace comes from walking her dog, cooking, singing, connecting with my community and attending weekly meetings to continue recovery from addiction and oppression.
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Medicare
Samantha (she/her) is a Licensed Social Worker, who became a therapist because she believes that change is always possible, and that humans have an inherent ability to heal and transform when they feel safe, heard, and connected. She understands that sometimes patterns of thinking or difficult emotions feel like they pull us away from living life fully. In session, Samantha works with individuals to identify their strengths, increase self-compassion, create safety in their bodies, and expand their capacity to respond in the face of life’s difficult moments. She’s also a big believer in the power of humor, and encourages her clients to bring their full selves into their work together.
Samantha specializes in working with young adults and adults as they move through life transitions. She has worked with individuals experiencing complex trauma responses, processing grief and loss, working through identity related concerns or religious deconstruction, and those struggling with shame, self-esteem/body image, suicidal ideation, depression, and anxiety. In her couples and relationship work, Samantha helps partners strengthen connection, navigate deep-seated conflict, and improve day to day communication. She has experience working with couples preparing for marriage/life transitions, and partnerships navigating the impact of trauma on their relationship.
Samantha shows up to sessions with compassion, curiosity, honesty, and hope, creating a space to slow down and tune into emotions, beliefs, and responses. While she often works in the present moment through using mindfulness and coping skills to manage immediate needs, she understands the impact our histories have on our sense of self and current challenges. She therefore takes a holistic perspective to treatment, and provides space to challenge societal messages and experiences related to sexism, racism, oppression, and marginalization, and their impact on your mental health.
She earned her Master of Arts in Social Work at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, and her Bachelor’s degree in Human Service Studies from Elon University in North Carolina. Prior to coming to LifePath, Samantha worked with college and graduate students at Columbia College of Chicago Counseling Services, with children and adolescents experiencing community violence and trauma, and in the field of community development, where she partnered with a health center in Uganda to conduct human-rights focused HIV/AIDS research.
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BCBS PPO
BCBS HMO (Site 475 and 489) Humana
Anu is a licensed clinical social worker with 15 years of psychotherapy experience. She received dual master’s degrees in Social Work and Women’s Studies from Loyola University, Chicago. She previously worked as a hospice and palliative care social worker for 7 years at Midwest Palliative and Hospice CareCenter (now Journeycare) where she provided care for individuals and families coping with with terminal and life limiting illnesses. Anu was a therapist at Thrive Counseling Center in Oak Park for 8 years, working with older adults providing at home psychotherapy, and also doing individual and family therapy with adults across the lifespan. There, she started and facilitated a support group for individuals struggling with death, loss and grief. She was one of the co-founders of the agency’s BIPOC group. She currently teaches core courses at Dominican University’s Graduate School of Social work. Anu’s previous experiences include running a shelter program and counseling women escaping partner violence.
As a clinician drawing from Family Systems theories, Anu has been utilizing concepts of a person in environment perspective to recognize and incorporate knowledge of systemic “isms.” She sees the therapeutic relationship as a collaboration between the individual and the therapist while exploring and creating supportive systems in the community which continue to aid the client and family in their recovery. She works with clients struggling with chronic mental illnesses and focuses on depression, anxiety, trauma and PTSD, marital and partner dynamics and challenges of individuals on the neurodivergent spectrum. She uses narrative and feminist therapeutic models to recognize intersectional challenges experienced by women, people of color and LGBTQI populations. Her therapeutic style is empathetic yet directive. Anu often utilizes her background in yoga teaching to help clients learn ways in which trauma manifests in the human body and incorporates mindfulness and meditative practices in her work.
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Aetna Medicare Advantage
BCBS PPO
BCBS HMO (Site 475 and 489)
Humana
Medicare
BCBS HMO Medicare Advantage (Site 475 and 489)
Optum/United Healthcare
Kim Vander Griend, AM, LCSW is a strengths-based, client-centered psychotherapist who focuses on partnering with clients while moving at their own pace. Her collaborative style utilizes an integrative, solution-focused approach where concrete skill development is addressed. Kim’s approach to therapy emphasizes the importance of seeking and creating healthy relationships. She believes strongly in utilizing the therapeutic relationship to explore positive change and growth. Kim draws from family systems, cognitive behavioral, motivational interviewing and psychodynamic theories in her practice.
Kim earned her Bachelor’s of Arts in Communications Arts and Sciences from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She earned her Master’s of Arts from The University of Chicago, The School of Social Service Administration. She completed her post-graduate clinical training at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in Baltimore, Maryland. She also was a Field Consultant and graduate student instructor at The University of Chicago, The School of Social Service Administration.
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Payton is a Licensed Professional Counselor who is passionate about providing care for individuals and couples experiencing a wide variety of challenges. Payton creates a safe place for clients to feel valued, heard, and empowered helping to foster personal growth. As a relational-cultural therapist, Payton helps clients gain insight into how relationships impact life experiences. Payton has had substantial experience working with adolescents and young adults navigating anxiety, depression, life transitions, interpersonal relationship issues, and substance abuse. Payton focuses on exploring values to aid clients in uncovering their life compass directing them towards a more fulfilled and purposeful life.
We face many challenges and stages in life’s journey and navigating through its different phases can sometimes be a difficult process. Payton focuses on supporting clients through this difficult process and collaborating with a strong therapeutic relationship. The beauty of therapy is that it will look different for each person and will be tailored to specific needs. Payton also specializes in facilitating sustainable empowerment and personal growth for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) community.
Payton is building interest in working with couples who are experiencing disruption in their relationship. Payton utilizes Emotion Focused Therapy and the Gottman Method to provide structure, space, empathy, warmth, and compassion. Payton is focused on helping couples increase awareness, intimacy, acceptance, regulation, respect, effective communication, and connection.
Her therapeutic approaches are centered around Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Mindfulness, Attachment Theory, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, Client-Centered, Solution-Focused, and trauma-informed care.
Payton earned her Master of Arts in Forensic Psychology from The Chicago School of Professional Psychology and Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Criminal Justice from the University of Northern Colorado. Payton gained invaluable experience as an intern in the Weld County, Colorado Public Defender’s Office and at Hartgrove Hospital where she provided counseling services to a myriad of individuals experiencing life transitions, anxiety, depression, interpersonal relationship conflict, gender-identity questions, and trauma history.
Outside of work, Payton enjoys reading, pilates, yoga, hiking, traveling, and good food!
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BCBS PPO
BCBS HMO (Site 475 and 489)
Humana
Each person is an expert of their own experience. Believing someone and accepting them as a human being worthy of love is the foundation for a successful therapeutic relationship. Kiernan deeply believes that when this supportive environment is provided, a person can begin to more fully listen to and trust in their own experience. This promotes greater self-awareness, and the ability to care for oneself. Kiernan works with trauma survivors and is committed to trauma-informed work.
Therapy is not just about addressing the unpleasant and troubling though; it also involves clarifying values and determining what gives your life meaning. Kiernan aims to help people discover what underlying stories they tell about themselves and explore alternative narratives.
Kiernan completed his Bachelors of Social Work at Goshen College and his masters from The University of Chicago, School of Social Service Administration. He previously worked as a substance abuse counselor in Virginia, and documented Human Rights abuses in Southern Mexico for two years.
In addition to a Person-Centered approach, Kiernan uses an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy framework for addressing human suffering. Distressing thoughts and feelings are an inevitable part of life; understandably we often try to suppress these painful experiences. He uses mindfulness and other experiential exercises with his clients to change how they interact with their thoughts and feelings. With couples, Kiernan uses a mix of the Gottman Method and EFT.
Other approaches used in therapy include Motivational Interviewing and Functional Analytic Psychotherapy. He works with individuals living with anxiety, depression, trauma, mood disorders, problematic substance use, and more.
Aetna
BCBS PPO
BCBS HMO (Site 475 and 489)
Humana
