Christina began her professional life in law. She earned her Juris Doctor from Louisiana State University and went on to work across legal practice, government and public policy.

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Her career included roles as an attorney with the Internal Revenue Service Chief Counsel, Principal Legislative Counsel with the National League of Cities, and attorney and Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Revenue.

The work moved between individuals and institutions, law and policy, the specific problem and the system surrounding it.

 

But Christina's career eventually moved somewhere else. Towards the human being inside those systems.

She returned to university to complete a Master of Science in Social Work, concentrating in Clinical Social Work, at the University of Texas at Austin. That opened another view of professional life beyond the rules governing what someone is required to do, towards the conditions affecting whether the human being can actually do it. 

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Christina went on to work in psychotherapy,  coaching, and as a lawyer assistance program professional. Her work has included trauma-informed counselling, crisis stabilisation, anxiety, depression and substance use, alongside helping people identify the obstacles affecting their professional and personal lives. 

 

She is the founder of Healing Bridge Psychotherapy, LLC, a boutique clinical practice specializing in the mental health and well-being of lawyers and legal professionals and offering highly individualized, confidential care informed by a firsthand understanding of legal culture. She is also the creator of HumanEsq LLC, providing coaching, speaking, and programming to lawyers and legal organizations seeking to meet the needs of the future of law by building the human capacities essential for sustainable performance, meaningful leadership, and human-centered innovation.

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There is something unusual in the perspective Christina brings to that room. She knows the system and the profession as well as the human trying to function inside both. 

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That is where Christina meets HOSA.

Christina has spent her career looking at the same human problem from very different places.

Law and public policy put her inside the systems, rules, institutions, decisions, and consequences. 

Clinical social work brought her much closer to the human living inside them, with a front-row seat to the human condition with across anxiety, depression, substance use, trauma and crisis, while the person tries to function through all of it. 

 

Christina would invest a lifetime looking for answers to questions like:  Where does the problem actually live? How does this problem show up in the person, their history, their biology, their present situation because where we locate the problem changes what we try to change.

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Put it all in the person and we can spend years helping someone adapt to conditions that are helping to create the problem.

Put it all in the environment and we can change everything around them without changing what they carry with them.

Christina has rich experience working with and in both sides. 

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HOSA gives her the whole person inside their HOSA environment to more precisely answer:

 

1. What is actually holding this in place?

2. Where is the constraint?

3. And where does our attention belong first?

Christina's professional background crosses disciplines that are rarely held by the same person. She holds a BA in Philosophy from Louisiana State University, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and a Juris Doctor from LSU's Paul M. Hebert School of Law. She later completed a Master of Science in Social Work, specialising in Clinical Social Work, at the University of Texas at Austin, where she was a member of the Phi Alpha Honor Society.

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She is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in Texas, a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker in Minnesota, and an Associate Certified Coach with the International Coaching Federation. She previously practised law and remains an inactive member of the Texas and Louisiana state bars.

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Her additional training includes contemplative-based trauma and resiliency training, Mental Health First Aid and mediation. She has served as a Well-Being Law Student Mentor at Quinnipiac University and on the leadership team of Lawyers Coaching Lawyers: International Network.

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Her career has taken her through law, government, legislative policy, family services, victim counselling, psychotherapy and professional assistance.

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Christina's career was designed around her mission to contextually understand the person and the environment together.  Christina brings her own research and questions to HOSA, including:  

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1. How do people best function inside systems?

2. What happens when they can't?

3. Where does responsibility sit?

4. What restores function while adding quality, and why does that work or not work? How do we know? 

5. What are we missing when we look at only one part for the person, the role, the system? 

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Christina is a HOSA Faculty Fellow and represents HOSA on the TED Law x ABA Advisory Board.

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It is a role that makes unusual sense given the career that came before it. Christina has worked in law, government and public policy. She has worked inside systems responsible for setting rules and shaping the conditions in which people live and work.

She then moved closer to the individual through clinical social work, psychotherapy, coaching, and lawyer assistance program professionals.

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Today, she works with the humans inside the legal profession. So when Christina takes HOSA into a legal conversation, she brings law, clinical practice. systems experience, and human experience, with an understanding that professional responsibility and human capacity cannot always be separated as neatly as our institutions would like.

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Her role on the TED Law x ABA Advisory Board creates an important bridge between HOSA and a profession already wrestling with questions of human judgement, professional responsibility, wellbeing, technology and institutional change. Christina's job is to bring HOSA into it clearly enough that it can be questioned, examined and tested.  And to bring what she encounters there back into HOSA.