Working with me:

Clients who select me as their therapist typically want to take a deeper look at themselves and are genuinely curious about who they are, leaning into their inner conflicts and dilemmas and they are interested in understanding themselves more fully. All problems are essentially relational: whether we are struggling with the relationship with our Self, or our relationship to work, substances, inequalities, loved ones, spirituality, our family of origin or even environmental concerns, these problems are, at their source, about our relationship to them. Clients who enjoy working with me want to know themselves more fully and feel closer to their loved ones, which often leads to engaging in their lives and their relationships more whole-heartedly as a result of our work.

I once reflected to a client, “The past feels irrelevant when the present is intolerable.” I work with clients in the present moment to develop coping strategies and make use of new tools, as well as providing emotional scaffolding to help with facing the onslaught of the persistent challenges we all face today. And I also work with clients to carefully listen together to the parts of them that have felt neglected, pushed away, denied or avoided. Healing and change can occur when we work side by side to uncover and explore the wounds that may have been left unattended by the necessities and demands of our modern lives.

Clients are often in search of greater alignment and authenticity in their lives which means they are willing to examine the ways they might not be fully accepting of themselves and others. This can lead to both, inner conflict within ourselves, as well as relationships that feel marred by struggle and tensions that feel unresolvable. And yet there is a way through! Curiosity, compassion, open-hearted active inquiry and engagement are all hallmarks of my work with clients. I am definitively passionate about helping my clients live the life that is waiting for them!

To this end, I am very aware of who I am in the room with and am conscientious about meeting you wherever you are in the process of expansion and healing. I have over 15 years of experience treating anxiety, depression and other mood disturbances, relationship difficulties including healing from affairs and other betrayals, as well as working with relational traumas, compulsions and eating disorder recovery, self-esteem and codependence difficulties, childhood sexual abuse, complex trauma and PTSD, and other common human challenges. I work with individuals, couples, parent-child, siblings and other relationship configurations and am open to including other family members as determined by the nature of the work.

​Education and qualifications:

I received my Bachelors of Arts in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley and a Masters of Arts in Counseling from Sonoma State University. I am a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, 83945. I am a Certified IFS Therapist, CSL-2039 by the IFS Institute. I am also a Certified Healing Shame Practitioner and teach graduate students in the Masters in Counseling Department at SSU (since 2019). I also provide clinical supervision to associates and trainees and train and teach extensively in my private practice as well. 

I draw from many different theories and schools of thought, as well as my own life experiences when I work. I have completed Level 2 Internal Family Systems training and have many years of experience in using IFS as a method of treatment with both individuals and couples. What I love so much about IFS is that it allows for multiple realities to co-exist simultaneously and provides a clear methodology for working with deeply entrenched internal conflicts, polarized beliefs about self and others, all the while we are strengthening our own sense of compassion, clarity, creativity, curiosity, connection, playfulness, presence, empowerment and more!

I am also influenced by the work of EFT, neuro-affective biology, healing trauma and shame via multiple modalities, and the science of attachment. While these are all larger frameworks that I work within, I am most broadly a relational therapist – which means that my work focuses most directly on my clients own power to heal themselves via our relationship and the new relationship they form with themselves in therapy. This occurs at all levels (cognitive, emotional, imaginal, relational and somatic) when together we can safely integrate past painful experiences in a new way.