Working with me:
Clients who benefit the most from my style of therapy are seeking greater authenticity in their lives which means they are willing to examine the ways they might not be fully accepting of themselves and others. Curiosity, compassion, open-hearted active inquiry and engagement are all hallmarks of my work with clients. I work with individuals, couples, parent-child, sibling and other relationship configurations and am open to including other family members as determined by the nature of the work.
Clients who select me as their therapist typically want to take a deeper look at themselves and are genuinely curious about themselves and are interested in answering the question about why they feel, act, speak and think what they do. My clients want to be in greater touch with themselves, their loved ones and reality and this leads them to being open to seeing and perceiving things differently as a result.
My work with couples is influenced by my strong belief that we are all seeking safe, secure and sexually alive connections with our partners. However, it is nearly inevitable that somewhere along the way our relationships are impacted by breeches in trust, miscommunications, misinterpretations and misattunements that lead us to feel that there is "little to no hope for us." I am here to help you both safely unpacked these "messes" together - with the help of new communication tools and insights into what is underneath a lot of these messes! My grounded presence and years of experience working with relationship difficulties will help us work together to heal the hurts that we have caused our most precious loved ones and create an even stronger and more resilient bond than we may have ever shared with our partner. I am happy to work with all types and configurations of relationships and am LGBTQ+ conscious (and always learning more!).
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 healing. I have over 10 years of experience treating anxiety, depression and other mood disturbances, relationship difficulties including healing from affairs and other betrayals, as well as working with everyday life traumas, addiction and eating disorder recovery, self-esteem and codependence difficulties, complex PTSD, and other common human challenges.
I am happy to provide a free telephone consultation to answer any questions you may have about me, the process of therapy, my availability, and fees. Call or email me to schedule a time that is convenient for us to talk.
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 Healing Shame Practitioner and have taught graduate students in the Masters Program at SSU and have provided Clinical Supervision to associates and trainees at SOS Community Counseling Clinic in Santa Rosa, CA.
I draw from many different theories and schools of thought, as well as my own life experiences when I work. I have been heavily influenced by the work of EFT, neuro-affective biology, healing trauma and shame via multiple modalities, Internal Family Systems 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. This occurs at all levels (rational, emotional and somatic processing) when we can safely integrate experiences that we've had that have been left behind us as the result of our survival needs.
