About Me

My practice is guided by the following principles:

You are the expert on you: My role is to tap your own knowledge and attune to your needs. I believe effective therapy is neither silent nor prescriptive.

A secure base: The heart of therapy is the relationship with the therapist. Our relationship is a crucible in which you gain insight into your ways of relating to others and can experiment safely with behavior change. It is safe but challenging, honest and real.

Your feelings make sense: Mental health symptoms such as depression and anxiety provide crucial information about your needs. Symptoms are not primarily a chemical imbalance; they originate in internal and external events, the present and the past.

No person is an island: The social work perspective emphasizes what happens between and around people. Well-being results from strong connections to others and the physical world. I can help you strengthen your connections to others through the skillful management of conflict and boundaries.

The body keeps the score: I appreciate the prevalence, variety and impact of trauma and the power of the parts of ourselves that operate outside of conscious awareness. Our emotions live in our bodies. The unconscious and the body offer rich resources for both diagnosis and healing.

The personal is political: I work to understand the impact of power, difference and injustice, and to affirm broad and fluid possibilities for personal identity, loving, and living.

Befriend your demons: We thrive when we can acknowledge, explore, share and respond with compassion to a wide range of feelings and the parts of ourselves we may not like. While rejection or suppression of these feelings and parts leads to dysfunction, "bad" feelings can tell us a lot when we approach with attention and curiosity.

Be here now: Therapy creates time for oneself in a distracting world and builds capacity for mindful attention.

Happiness is a skill: it can be practiced and learned. Like playing an instrument, progress is achieved through small steps and repetition over time.

My method is integrative: I am committed to learning a range of approaches and staying current with innovations in the field. My particular interests include trauma, attachment, family systems theory, mindfulness meditation and yoga. I have been influenced by the work of Tara Brach, Pema Chodron, Milton Erickson, Stephen Miller, Paul Watzlawick, Virginia Satir, John Bowlby, and Donald Winnicott, among many others.