As a social worker, I have developed deeply rooted passions and skills working with individuals across the lifespan, and now specialize in therapy with teens and adults. In our work together, we can collaborate to address a range of important issues in your life. This may include working to understand painful or traumatic experiences from one’s early or present day life, navigating relationship challenges or transitions, connecting with one’s own body, all while exploring one’s inner emotional world more deeply.
People who enter into therapy with me may be struggling with the ways that overwhelming emotions, traumatic stress, dissociation, or challenging interpersonal dynamics have been manifesting in their lives. They may be having difficulty feeling safe or “at home” in their bodies; may be engaging in self-injury (behaviors that result in physical or emotional injury); or are trying to reckon their past experiences with current emotional struggles. Some people may have found that having only an intellectual understanding of their experiences has not always helped them to transform distressing interpersonal issues, process complex emotions, or shift persistent behavior patterns. Some may be experiencing severe and chronic dissociation, which can make it very difficult for a person to feel connected and alive in the present moment.
I strive to honor the unique ways that every person will experience and utilize the therapeutic process. I regularly integrate the principles of somatic, relational, and psychodynamic therapies into my treatment approach. When we first meet, we can talk more about what you feel is important to address in therapy now, while we begin to draft a new and flexible “map” that can guide our work together to support ongoing growth and change. On this page, you can read more about some of my areas of specialization and consider if any of these feel meaningful to you and your own unique journey.
Ofrezco todos mis servicios en español y estoy feliz hablar contigo, por teléfono y en persona, sobre tus intereses, preferencias, y esperanzas para la psicoterapia y tu salud mental.
Tuttomondo, by Keith Haring
Wisdom of the Body
There are so many experiences that can influence or transform the relationships that we have with our bodies. When our bodies undergo transitions, be they welcome, planned, or unplanned, it can be very helpful to navigate those changes with therapeutic support. After experiencing trauma, some people may find themselves feeling numb or disconnected, while others may feel flooded and painfully overwhelmed by their emotions and physical sensations. Sometimes people find themselves getting stuck in chronic patterns of self-protection—fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and collapse responses that cause confusion and disruption in daily life. Others may find that the ways they are coping with intolerable emotional experiences are also causing them physical injury, isolating them in their relationships, and potentially triggering more distress in the aftermath. Body and movement-based therapies offer us unique opportunities to create an embracing and supportive context to safely connect with your embodied experience, stabilize and reorient your nervous system, and develop a new relationship with your body on your terms.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is rooted in the principles of mindfulness and draws from neuroscience, somatic therapies, cognitive approaches and attachment theory to safely explore, process, and integrate trauma-related thoughts, emotions, and body-based experiences. I am certified as a Level 2 Sensorimotor Psychotherapy practitioner. To learn more, click here.
Intersecting Identities
I am committed to co-creating an affirming healing space with teens and adults who live across a wide spectrum of identity, embodiment, and experience. I maintain a deep commitment to supporting folks in an ongoing process of discovering themselves, creating language for their lives, and exploring what it could mean for them to feel more fully connected and whole.
I believe that responsible therapeutic work requires cultivating and committing to the practice of critical consciousness, a practice that interrogates the dynamics of power, control, and domination at individual, interpersonal, group and systemic levels in our world. Through this frame, we are better equipped to attend to the consequences of traumatic reenactments between individuals or among collectives, as well as the overt ways that racist, misogynist, ableist, hetero-patriarchal aggression and violence can wound and strain the bodies and psyches of women, people of color, people with disabilities, people who are undocumented, LGBT people, and people who do not possess class privilege. In the therapeutic frame, I value holding space for curiosity and exploration about the intersecting, intertwining threads of our various identities and stories, attuning to the struggles, the strengths, and the powerful complexities of these parts of our selves and our historical legacies.
Growth and healing in relationship
Human beings are relational and cultural creatures. Over time and through experience, we develop our own particular ways of relating to other people, forming beliefs and expectations about how they will respond to our emotions, needs, and personalities if we express them authentically. We may learn, for example, that certain emotions will be valued in the environments we inhabit, while other emotions will be discouraged, ignored, or even harshly rejected by those around us. The ways we learn to adapt to these realities, in early life and beyond, will shape our sense of self, our ability to experience intimacy with others, as well as our ability to feel deeply, honestly connected to our internal core being. Over time, these adaptations and defenses can leave us feeling profoundly disconnected from core parts of our true selves, interfering with our capacity to express our authentic feelings and needs, and experience both personal autonomy and relational intimacy. We might find that familiar, unsatisfying, and even painful interpersonal dynamics are being consistently recreated and replayed in our relationships with others.
In relational psychodynamic psychotherapy, we use the therapeutic relationship itself to deepen insight into your own relational styles and facilitate the experiencing and expression of emotions that have been blocked, diminished, or denied. Co-creating a safe and collaborative alliance in the therapy space can allow us to explore how you might be more fully present and engaged in your relationships without divesting of important parts of your true self and authentic emotional experiences.