My Approach to Helping
I welcome you to come as you are.
I approach growth and healing holistically and appreciate you as multi-faceted - feeling, thinking, physical, social, and spiritual. As we work together, we'll consider how various aspects of yourself can become more balanced to facilitate your overall experience of well-being.
I consider our collaborative therapeutic relationship an authentic meeting of equals. I understand you as essentially good, worthy, unique, and capable. I'll recognize your existing strengths and skills, and build on them for future successes.
We'll explore the interplay between what's conscious to you now and underlying dynamics that may not yet be fully conscious. We'll aim to bring subconscious dynamics to your fuller awareness.
Our therapeutic relationship will serve as a tool for learning about your relationship style and patterns.
We'll pay closer attention to your habitual thought patterns and consider how unexamined thoughts can sometimes trigger feelings and reactions that aren't so helpful for you. We'll consider expanded perspective for more balanced, useful views of yourself and others.
With mindfulness practice, you'll shift gears from "autopilot" to a more intentional curiosity and acceptance of what's happening in the current moment.
In working with couples, I draw from emotionally focused couple therapy and non-violent communication.
I bring humility, respect, and genuine interest to our collaboration. My style is down-to-earth, non-pathologizing, and interactive, with healthy doses of humor. I welcome diversity and embrace a social justice perspective.
I've been in practice as a psychotherapist since 2000.
More Info About My Practice
I specialize in emotional neglect and adult children of highly stressed, conflictual, and or dysfunctional families or origin. Many who come to me for support are seeking to cultivate a clearer, fuller sense of self and identity. I help folks who didn't receive emotional and psychological attunement from their parents as children, due to parental narcissism, trauma, substance abuse, and-or mental illness, or due to abandonment, neglect, excessive criticism, and-or abuse. I offer support around increased attunement to feelings and needs, finding your voice, assertiveness, pro-active communication, conflict management, self-esteem, shyness and social anxiety, introversion, sensitivity, life meaning, purpose, and transitions. I offer support in cultivating authentic connections with others and in healing struggles in relationships around self-esteem, assertiveness, boundaries, enmeshment and co-dependence, and isolation.
I work with couples around managing the impact on the relationship of one or both partners' trauma history, balancing individuality and relationship, co-dependence, boundaries, communication skills, conflict management, and affair recovery.
*I offer video and phone sessions for clients residing in the state of California.
How Psychotherapy Can Help
When we collaborate in the healing process, we'll be tuning in to and drawing from your unique strengths - your enduring resilience, your essential wisdom, and your creative spirit - as the foundation for addressing the real challenges and struggles you face.
I offer you a safe space for exploring and more deeply understanding your experience of stuckness, vulnerability, or conflict.
I'll help you to anchor yourself with compassion and validation, to become empowered to find your voice, and to practice new communication and coping skills.
From a wider lens, I'll help you to see new choices for change that are both practical and meaningful, and that more fully align with your core values, sense of purpose, needs, and goals as you move forward into the life you envision for yourself.
