Therapist Directory

Life can be very confusing sometimes! My understanding is that each of us is different and there are no easy answers for most of life's questions. I am happy to be engaged in the mystery of life with you. Using my humanistic and transpersonal approach, my goal is to help you create meaning out of life and develop coping skills. I acknowledge all spiritual and religious traditions, including atheism. At the end of the day, I don't know the "right" answer. All I know is that being kind and brave is important. I want to honor the things that are important to you too.

It sucks to live with thoughts, feelings, and beliefs that aren’t welcoming, hopeful or kind, doesn’t it? When that inner stream is clouded with shame, negativity, or apathy, therapy can be a filter to clear out the toxins and make way for the new–the braver, the steadier, the integrated, the you that has the room and gumption to flourish. Getting acquainted with your badass, authentic self deserves your full attention, intention, and compassion. Leveraging somatic practices and the latest in neuroscience and clinical intuition, I am here to help you contact your innate self-righting capacity and embodied wisdom—a personalized treasure trove. Sessions with me often include attention to the body and the breath, mindfulness and visualization work, art, movement, talk, humor, and embodied metaphor. Let's get to it.

In response to California's Shelter in Place, I'm now offering Telehealth/Online Therapy services by video or phone for short-term or long term work.

You’re not broken, though at times in life we can feel that way. Reaching out for support can be difficult, but it is the first step to feeling like life is working again. I help individuals and couples facilitate their process of living a fuller, deeper, more authentic, and balanced life through mindfulness-based and somatic psychotherapy. It’s an honor to sit with my clients and be a part of their journey.

I am a trauma-informed, somatic psychotherapist offering telehealth sessions to clients throughout California.

I strive to create a space rooted in trust, where you will feel safe to slow down and explore all parts of yourself, your strengths, and your challenges. As you share what troubles you, I will follow your lead with curiosity and compassion. Together, we will seek to understand why things are as they are so that you can know yourself more fully. This understanding is the beginning of acceptance, healing, and change.

During this time, caring for our mental health is essential to get through this together. To do our part to flatten the curve I have moved all of my sessions to either over the phone or a HIPAA compliant online video service. Be well, Be safe.

Are you in transition? Struggling with anxiety, depression, self-criticism, or low self-esteem and tired of simply surviving? Wanting to feel more empowered in your life, relationships, and at work? Are you seeking a warm, caring therapist who will listen and help support you? Who is devoted to your wellbeing and can offer both the practical help and emotional support to help you to thrive? If so, I'd like to help.

I work with adolescents, women, men, and couples desiring new opportunities for themselves and their lives. Often at a crossroads, struggling with the aftermath of their early family lives, coping with overwhelm or loss, or trying to find ways to live more at peace with themselves and their loved ones, my clients come from all walks of life.

As my client, I will treat you with respect, thoughtfulness, and compassion. Whether you want to learn more about yourself and your feelings, develop new skills, cope with life's challenges, or pursue a journey of self-discovery, we will work together to create an experience tailored to your specific needs and goals.

If you are struggling or simply want an ally in creating a better life, I invite you to call me.

Therapy provides a space dedicated solely to your wellbeing and growth. Some of the things I work with include anxiety, depression, loss and grief, the impacts of oppression, identity, race-based stress, challenging family dynamics, boundaries, coming out, interpersonal relationship challenges, self-harm, the voice of an inner critic, and the impacts of trauma, including early developmental trauma.

Let’s admit we all have broken places. It is part of the human condition. We all have situations we just can’t figure out on our own. In my 20 years as a social worker, most of my clients start therapy saying some version of “I just don’t know what to do.” Together we cultivate the emotional safety necessary to examine where you are and where you need to go, as well as the courage to get there step by step.

Do you feel paralyzed when facing a major life transition—deciding a career path, stepping into adulthood, becoming a couple or separating, becoming a parent or not? Perhaps your relationship is frozen and you and your partner can't talk without fighting or can't agree on a shared vision for your lives. By working together we can shed a kind light on the dark places and approach them with safety and curiosity. You determine the pace as we make sense of things and find the places where movement and change can happen.

Does it feel like nothing is ever good enough and neither are you? You don’t have to feel this way—therapy helps. We will work together so you can learn to calm yourself down, build confidence, feel more hopeful, communicate more effectively, build and have better relationships, feel comfortable in your own skin, feel whole, and much more!

My areas of focus include relationship issues; perfectionism; compulsive behaviors (overeating, drinking, dieting, work, sex...); trauma (e.g. rape, abuse, car accidents...); couples (interracial and interfaith); and cross-cultural issues. I have a warm and direct style and whether you’re seeing me as an individual or as a couple, you will come away from our work with more choice and freedom in your life.

Passion for my work combines my interests in the body/mind connection, love of diverse cultures, and fascination with human nature. I love what I do and truly respect my clients' willingness to bring their inner world to the forefront. Let's talk so you can begin the journey to feel better.

I am a somatic therapist who focuses on relational, attachment, and childhood trauma issues. I work with individuals and couples to address relationship ambivalence, codependence, anxiety, depression, major life transition, PTSD and trauma, shame and low self-esteem, and poor communication and conflict, among other issues. I help you build awareness of your thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations, allowing you to develop greater insight and uncover new choices.

*ACCEPTING NEW CLIENTS & RESUMING IN-PERSON COUNSELING AT MY SAN FRANCISCO OFFICE, ON A LIMITED BASIS, BEGINNING JUNE 1, 20201.

Using clinically proven treatment methods both in-person and via Teletherapy, I work holistically to get your life back on track. I specialize in treating anxiety issues and disorders, depression, and relationship/marriage issues. After a complete diagnostic assessment, I am able to combine treatments to address other mental health concerns such as complex trauma, re-parenting, grief, addiction, PTSD, confidence, work/life balance, abuse, and sexual issues.

When we feel threatened and vulnerable, we resort to desperate behaviors to get us through the day: numbing out with screens or drugs, revving up with anger, and a hundred other fight/flight/freeze responses. The problem is that these behaviors can become calcified, and we get stuck in a pattern. What starts out as protective becomes a prison.

I work with teens and adults to explore new behaviors and develop insights into these psychological snags. The aim is to build executive functioning and emotional intelligence while facilitating the transition to healthy independence. In my conception of therapy, these “upward spirals” are both supported by and promotive of a more loving relationship with the self.

My style can be directive or non-directive, depending on the needs of the individual, but is always warm and engaged, with a healthy dash of humor.

Everyone encounters feelings of dissatisfaction and confusion in their lives, questioning their choices, their direction, or even who they are at the core. I provide a calm, nonjudgmental space for you to share the things that trouble you, especially the things that are hard to share or the parts of you that you may not feel good about. I work to help you see how what you feel makes sense, making connections to past experiences, and coming to new self-understanding and acceptance.

I'm here to help you understand and accept yourself, make sense of difficult experiences, and find more of what makes you truly happy. This might mean working through unprocessed trauma that is holding you back or examining your patterns in relationships. Whatever path our work takes, I believe self-knowing and self-compassion are at its core. Who are you, what is hurting inside you, and what do you need to feel whole? Let’s get curious and find out together.

In order to facilitate your healing, we will have real conversations about you and your life—the kind of conversations that sing in your heart and mind and take you to places you never expected.

My approach includes giving you space, security, and encouragement to explore your past and the deeper parts of the mind that may be driving your day-to-day decisions. We will look at what’s bothering you and find a way forward. Through deep listening, I help make sense of inner disturbances that are creating outer conflicts in your life. As you overcome anxieties and unhealthy expectations, you will discover your own alive and authentic self as well as identify and organize turbulent feelings, clarifying your expectations. We will work toward resolving old wounds and developing new ways of thinking as you disentangle from your struggles. Your interest in new skills and knowledge will be the starting point for further growth as you find a way to live life as yourself, free, open, and self-accepting.

Whatever reason has brought you to seek therapy in this moment is no doubt unique to you. It is my firm belief that you are the authority on your life and that each one of us deserves support. My goal is to offer support on your distinct healing journey. As a trauma informed somatic practitioner, I take into consideration your mind and your body, specifically how your nervous system is responding to whatever it is you are bringing to therapy. In a collaborative way we will find ways to bring more ease into your being.

I provide strength-based, trauma-informed psychotherapy to youth, adults, and families who are seeking support with healing what hurts, transforming patterns that no longer serve them, and creating a path towards greater resilience and meaning in their lives.

Although it might be difficult to recognize at first, painful transitions and experiences can provide opportunities for immense personal growth and deeper connection to yourself and others. Therapy can help you tap into your own innate wisdom and capacity to grow, while offering additional tools for navigating life’s inevitable twists and turns.

**In light of current events, I am now offering teletherapy sessions so I can meet remotely with clients. Somatic psychotherapy is very well-suited to processing the current fears and anxieties, lack of control, social isolation, and financial stress impacting us all. Please note, that at this time all psychotherapy services will take place online as video sessions in place of in-person sessions. This is a temporary safety precaution in an attempt to prevent COVID-19 exposure. In-person sessions will resume at a future date.

If you are feeling disconnected from yourself, struggling to form relationships, or feeling a loss of control, therapy might be the right choice for you. I will offer you a safe and supportive place to explore your experiences to help you trust yourself again. In the face of trauma, addiction, anxiety, and depression I can help you reclaim a sense of safety, pleasure, and joy. You are not alone, and yes, it can get better.

We are all worthy of love and belonging. My approach is compassionate and warm. My trauma-informed approach is rooted in relational therapy and somatic frameworks. I aim to meet my clients with respect, authenticity, curiosity, humility and humor. The connections that we make with ourselves and others are often the inspiration and the resource needed to build lasting change in our lives—to learn how to listen to the wisdom of our bodies and celebrate the brilliant creatures we have become. Your uniqueness will inform our journey together.

Effective therapy is both challenging and nourishing. It helps you understand your thoughts, motivations, and feelings so that you can move through what’s in the way of your freedom and contentment in relationships, helping you find meaning and develop self-confidence.

I am a holistic therapist who works with individuals and couples to address transparency and truth, developing conscious relationships, effective communication, trauma, life purpose, career and relationship transitions, or the general feeling of stuckness or that life isn’t what it could be.

I excel with people that are interested in self-knowledge, transforming their relationships with an open and honest approach, and developing an ability to understand their romantic partner's perspectives and motivations.

It can be easy to lose sight of ourselves. As we move through life, we pick up patterns of relating to ourselves, to our environment, and to the present moment. Maybe we go numb, act out, or betray ourselves to please another. These patterns have likely helped us in the past, and yet now they might hold us back or even bring us more pain than relief. The things we once enjoyed may feel empty and our loved ones like strangers.

Whether passing through a difficult time, living with the repercussions of a tumultuous past, or a combination of both, we can find ways to build our own stable footing. With safety, compassion, and curiosity we can review and rework those patterns. We can unearth and tend to our authentic self and, choosing each moment, find our joy and our ease.

Do you feel like you are watching your life from the outside? Are you used to feeling “lost” in your relationships? Have you notice yourself trying to please others to the detriment of yourself? Does doing all the things you are “supposed to do” feel dissatisfying? Has a great loss pushed everything you thought you knew out the window? Are you wondering, “Who am I?”

Together we will explore any and all of the questions that brought you to therapy. I believe that you have an innate ability to answer these questions and that it is my honor to facilitate your process of self-discovery and healing. We will embark on this journey with curiosity, awareness, and authenticity. I will support you in developing empathy and compassion for all parts of yourself, especially the parts that you may have hidden away from yourself or disconnected from, the ones that feel shameful, scary, or overwhelming. Through cultivating love and acceptance for your entire experience without judgment, new possibilities and more choices will reveal themselves.

I invite you to embark on a journey to explore the ways your multiple identities, relationships, and struggles weave together and impact the way you show up in this world. It would be an honor to travel alongside you. I will support you as you find what it means to show up authentically in all aspects of your life. I will be there with warmth, empathy, some direction, a bit of humor, and a lot of curiosity.

Things have changed A LOT in a very short amount of time due to the Pandemic. You may be having fears about what may happen to you, the economy, or the world. Or you may find yourself relatively okay but, sometimes some seemingly small thing can leave you feeling completely overwhelmed. Is it hard to talk to friends and family right now? Or do you find yourself quarantined with people you like and/or love, but this much time together is simply too much! Would you like some support in the comfort and safety of your own home? Online therapy with me can help.

Online therapy can offer a place to talk to someone outside of the situation about your fears and anxieties. It’s a place you can destress, get resourced, and learn new ways to have boundaries that can actually strengthen your relationships. You may also feel more alone and/or lonely than you’ve ever felt, in that case, online therapy can be especially good because you have a set time each week to connect with someone and be real.

I am committed to guiding my clients toward a deeper experience and understanding of themselves and their lives. I assist with the unfolding of their own natural processes of change and growth and work to foster a sense of self-acceptance and curiosity as they begin to open up to themselves more and more.

In this process of opening up, great distress and pain often accompany possibilities for connection and joy. Therefore, I find it crucial to help clients befriend the difficult places inside of themselves in the service of developing a sense of wholeness and integration.

I find that all of this lends to a way of experiencing life that is more centered, grounded, and resilient. While guiding clients in this manner, I help them to access a newfound connection to their own empowerment and choicefulness. By engaging with the utmost respect for the ways in which my clients decide to respond to and shape their lives, I help to instill in them the courage to be who they are.

Is the state of the world making you question your purpose and direction in life? Therapy can help bring more clarity. Video sessions available at this time.

Do you have a hard time speaking up and expressing yourself? Do you have such empathy for others and the world that it can get in your way of knowing what you truly want and need?

When you anticipate a conflict or someone who may have a differing opinion than you, you tend to keep quiet to maintain the peace. Although you embrace this kind and gentle part of you that is what others see, you know there is more to you than these parts. You are capable, accountable, and have achieved a lot. There is more fire in you that wants to come out in the world and make things happen.

I can help you access the other parts of you that the world doesn’t get to see, the parts that you don’t acknowledge in you but can see and admire in others, and the parts that once they are allowed to come out can help you navigate life with less doubt, more ease and clarity.

In our frenzied, accomplishment-focused world, it is easy to lose touch with who we are, and how we want to show up in our lives. We may have reached our goals, yet find that we are not as satisfied or as joyful as we had imagined we would be. The therapeutic relationship is a great opportunity to slow down and examine our lives, and ultimately make choices that feel more aligned with what we want and how we want to feel.

I hold a non-judgmental space where all of you is welcome, even the ugly, scary, and forgotten parts. My goal as a therapist is to allow you to more fully experience yourself, and begin to let go of anything that does not feel like the most authentic, true version of yourself. I truly believe in the therapeutic relationship, and the value of a trusted witness in our healing process.

My approach is client-led, relational and humanistic. I integrate the body, mind, and spirit and work in collaboration with you as a whole person. While my training is grounded in psychodynamic theory, I draw from a variety of traditions. Above all, I treat each client as an individual and the therapy is ultimately led by your needs and intentions in doing this work.

I help clients transform patterns; increase tolerance for uncertainty and fear; cultivate self-compassion; and deepen in relationship.

I believe that we suffer because of the world, culture, and systems in which we live, not because we are broken. At best these systems around us mean well but often don’t support us in the ways we need; at worst, they oppress, violate and even kill us. To survive, we must adapt. At creation, our adaptations are brilliant, but often we outgrow them, or they control us. These adaptations may impact you through chronic anxiety, symptoms of depression, a fierce inner critic, loneliness, or shame.

Clinical Expertise:

• Pandemic-related depression, isolation, or overwhelm
• Grief and loss
• Anxiety, including social anxiety
• Self-doubt, insecurity, perfectionism, inner critic
• Struggling with the day-to-day, desiring increased coping skills
• Difficulty in intimate relationships
• White folks addressing systemic racism, internalized white supremacy and white fragility
• Burnout, career or otherwise
• Persons recovering from traumatic experiences

My role as a psychotherapist is to help clients acknowledge and harness their innate strengths, enabling them to attain and sustain the well-being they are searching for. What holds us back? What keeps us returning to habitual patterns that limit us? How can we heal from past experiences or learn to cope with current life challenges? Together we will examine your life from many vantage points, with compassion and curiosity. By expanding how you view yourself, relate to others, and respond to difficult circumstances, new possibilities will emerge.



My areas of expertise include:
• Cultivating self-compassion to combat shame, self-criticism, and threats to self worth
• Advocating for the unique issues LGBTQ individuals face
• Understanding and coping with depression and anxiety
• Examining the causes and harmful cycles of addiction and codependency
• Exploring intimacy concerns for individuals and couples
• Supporting clients coping with grief and loss
• Building resilience while navigating life transitions
• Embracing cross-cultural differences and attachment patterns in couples
• Working with childhood trauma

I specialize in psychospiritual integration, personal growth, and ushering along the path of awakening. My strength is in clearly seeing blocks and identifying and teaching shamanic and mindfulness-based techniques that can help. I deeply honor each soul's individual path. Using self-empowering spiritual practices such as vipassana meditation, tensegrity, qigong, and soul retrieval, I will help you to identify and create habits and behaviors that will lead you in the direction that matters to you most long after the therapy is finished.

In my office, you will find a safe and comfortable space where curiosity and compassion guide us towards your self-discovery and healing. Depending on your specific needs, we will shape our time together using creativity and what you already know about yourself. I respect your self-knowing and prioritize your pace and agency to guide our therapeutic dynamic and movement towards positive change.

Together we can increase your tolerance of anxiety, anger, and other overwhelming emotions and create more choices for you to feel empowered rather than stuck or reactionary. We can monitor and learn from your stress responses (fight, flight, freeze, etc.) in order to improve your communication with others, self-care, and general functioning. I can also guide you towards more self-compassion and wisdom, rooted in the body, where you can revisit and recharge when you need it.

Through our work, you’ll heal and move toward inner strength and wholeness by reclaiming disowned parts of yourself, parts you have othered or exiled, knowingly or not. We will make room for your multi-dimensionality and the intricate complexities within you. I believe in the work we can do to make peace possible for you.

“Practice harm reduction by being radically honest about your messiness.”
-Chani Nicholas

As human beings, we walk the planet with a complex matrix of shame, hurt, and resistance that can be peeled away like layers of an onion. With patient, careful, and nonjudgmental guidance, we can work to discover the deepest core of our beliefs, desires, and needs, expanding our stories and drawing meaning from our experiences.

With this improved awareness, we can build tools and resources for addressing challenges and, perhaps more importantly, create a more peaceful relationship with those challenges. As a result, we become better at our relationships with ourselves and others. Better communicators. Better at boundaries. Better at compassion. Better at receiving the love and care we need.

We are living in unprecedented times.

This can be an opportunity to renegotiate every aspect of life. While change is often challenging, I have found that it is easier to navigate together. We will look at the complex landscape of your life, where there is flow and vitality, as well as the places that feel blocked. With honesty, compassion, and courage, we will explore how to support your innate resilience.

I serve as a guide for people who want to create meaningful change and live in alignment with their values. My approach is primarily somatic, meaning I bring curiosity to one’s felt experience—a fluttering in the chest or muscle tightening—as a way to get to know oneself more deeply and process stuck experiences. I offer mindfulness-based tools for both exploring one’s felt experience as well as building skills for coping with stress.

We arrive in this world inherently interdependent. Helpless and alive we rely on our caregivers to nurture and love us. Sometimes this comes at a cost, and we are wounded by the very relationships we rely on for survival. Our mind and body are organized by our early experiences, which lay the foundation for how we relate to the world around us, one another, and ourselves.
Often times we seek therapy when we realize adaptive strategies that once served us are now limiting our growth. I am here to offer a safe relationship in which you can explore your desire to better understand patterns that emerge in your life, why ways of relating to yourself and others may have served you in the past, and how you can open to the possibility of making different choices as you continue to grow.

I specialize in working with people who struggle with complex trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Complex trauma is often the result of growing up with a caregiver who was abusive, neglectful, and/or suffered from mental illness or addiction. Complex trauma can also be a result of growing up in an environment where there was poverty, frequent incarceration, violence, and oppression. Symptoms of complex trauma include anxiety, depression, difficulty with relationships, chronic pessimism, fear of success, and a sense of feeling broken or that something is wrong with you.

I am trained in various techniques that specifically work with trauma and I work with an anti-oppression perspective. I have a diverse caseload and include you and your family’s particular socio-political-historical context when considering the impact of intergenerational trauma. You do not have to identify with, or have suffered from, complex trauma to contact me. I also work with attachment and relationship issues, perfectionism, giftedness, gender and masculinity, and issues around immigration, acculturation, and belonging.

I help people who are seeking deeper meaning, connection, and purpose in their lives. As a queer- and spiritual-identified woman, I often work at the intersection of spiritual, sexual, and gender identity, supporting the complexity of that experience. People like me often find communities that will honor one part of their identity while ignoring the others. In my practice, LGBTQIA-identified individuals and couples in the Bay Area can access a safe therapeutic environment that affirms each layer of their identity, facilitates meaningful connections, and awakens purpose. My unique relational-Gestalt psychotherapy approach encourages clients to tap into their true potential and live a life with deeper meaning and fuller joy.

I also specialize in autism and educational therapy. Anxiety can have a large impact on quality of life. If you have autism, strict behavioral methods will not reduce chronic anxiety because they do not address the underlying social and emotional experience. My well-developed approach uses the latest findings in psychology, education, and neuroscience to tremendously reduce autism-related-anxiety.

I can help by joining you in exploring your anxiety, your fear, your grief, and your relationships. Together we will be able to look at patterns which may be negatively impacting your ability to function and unravel them for a more fulfilling and satisfying life.

Therapy can help you:
• Decide how to have strong relationships with appropriate people
• Share what you hate and love about yourself and others
• Better communicate your needs and wants
• Discover ways to be kinder to yourself

Seeking support for life's inevitable challenges is a courageous and powerful choice. Consider me a partner on your path of increasing empowerment.

Therapy can offer a safe space for exploration and acceptance of a wider range of your life experience, which can lead to positive change. From my end, I will bring to our relationship a sense of non-judgment, warmth, and humor along with professional expertise.

I strive to be flexible, open, and inclusive, and thus draw from varied psychological and philosophical orientations. I am actively engaged in anti-oppression work, both personally and professionally. I honor diversity and welcome people from all walks of life.

I am currently offering therapy by phone and via the online video platform Zoom. If you would like to talk with someone during this time, please feel free to reach out to me.

I specialize in grief counseling and helping older individuals and couples navigate the challenges of aging.

We live in a world that has no time for grief and no patience for the physical and emotional challenges of aging. Because our culture has so little tolerance for these experiences, people are forced to push down their feelings and pretend that they’re not in any pain. As a result, it's easy to become lost in your grief and frustrated in your efforts to find meaning and joy as you age.

I also work with the families of substance abusers, helping them get their lives back on track and find a level of happiness whether their loved one is using or not.

If you are feeling lost, broken, overwhelmed, or in need of something more from your life, therapy can help reconnect you to yourself. I provide depth-oriented individual psychotherapy to adults and adolescents in the East Bay. I enjoy supporting people who feel stuck due to depression, anxiety, difficulties in relationships, and distress related to past and present trauma. I have experience working within the LGBTQI+ community and welcome people who occupy non-conforming gender and sexual identities.

Together we will work to connect to your authentic thoughts and emotions, build insight into the origins of your struggles, highlight your strengths, and make space for the things that bring you meaning. This process of exploration can promote greater self-awareness, increased confidence in navigating challenging situations, and a deepened relationship to self and others.

The impact of society on our sense of self is profoundly real. In an oppressive and chaotic world, you may feel overwhelm, fear, doubt, shame or feel stuck and unfulfilled. You are not alone in this experience and I'm glad you are here. Healing is often a mirrored process and becomes possible when we truly feel seen. I believe we all possess a space of internal abundance, and when tended to ritualistically, we can move from a place of empowerment and grounding as a means of navigating the very flawed systems that affect us all.

The core of my practice is to better understand the place where your external and internal experiences have met and have been at odds with each other. For many, especially those existing outside of dominant identities, this place can be the site of wounds and survival strategies that knock us off of our emotional and spiritual center. Just as significantly, this space can hold cultivated resilience, awareness, and intentional community and connection; perhaps healing strategies you already embody.

The therapy I provide is particularly helpful for those working through trauma, depression, anxiety, attachment, identity, relationships, sexuality and general life transitions. My practice is open to all, and I most enjoy working with queer, femme, gender non-binary and gender expansive individuals, creatives, and highly sensitive persons.

As one can observe in nature, our innate impulse is to heal. Sometimes our access to this resiliency is along an ever-winding path. Life—relationships, behaviors, community, culture—impacts our ability to fulfill this impulse. In our sessions we will creatively collaborate to rediscover and widen your access to the path toward healing. We will hold your innate wisdom and resiliency alongside the parts of you that feel incongruent, sticky, stubborn, and shameful, honoring that each part deserves to be listened to without judgment. We will learn how to find balance in the fullness of you.

To be seen and understood for who you are by someone with good intentions and real knowledge can help you know that you are real and your experience of life is also real. Being understood in this way is at the heart of being human. It is also at the foundation of building a resilient sense of self that allows you to overcome your wounds and achieve your full potential. We need to be fully human before we can evolve and transcend as either psychological or spiritual beings.

I believe that you are the foremost expert on your own experiences, and I know how difficult it can be to find a therapist who feels like the right fit. While my professional interests are LGBTQ+ identities, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, and college transitions, I welcome all teens and adults with a warm, playful, and encouraging style. My approach is integrative, strength-based, and client-centered. Together, we’ll discuss your unique past experiences, and discover how they influence you in the present and can lead to new choices and new outcomes in the future. I hope to help you create meaningful changes, stronger relationships, and a greater sense of self by focusing on your strengths and using a blend of different therapeutic styles that best match your individual personality and needs.

I excel at working with individuals, couples, and families with adult children. I focus on a wide variety of issues, including, but not limited to, stress, dating, relationships, sex, trauma, and domestic violence. I help people create better relationships and clear obstacles to those relationships. I help couples dealing with communication issues, financial issues, differences in desire and problems with intimacy, navigating nontraditional relationships, and problems with division of labor.

Life can be hard at times and not having the right tools can be challenging. Whether you are struggling with past trauma, relationship issues, depression, anxiety, addiction, or events in your life that are emotionally draining, we can work together to figure out the best way to live your fullest life. I have a direct, honest, and compassionate style of communicating that allows us to focus on your goals in a collaborative and constructive way, but most importantly in a way that makes sense to you. Let therapy guide you in the direction you want to go.

You may be looking for help healing from a troubled past, facing fears and uncertainty about the future, or coping with the everyday challenges of your present life, work, and relationships. Help can take many forms. Support from family and friends, your faith, nature, pets, actions you take to advocate for your health and wellbeing, and encounters with healing places or people can change your life and shift your perspective. Help can also come through the authentic relationship you develop with a therapist who is a reasonably right fit for you.

My somatic psychotherapy practice is collaborative and trauma-informed. I work with adults and couples who want more satisfying, authentic relationships with themselves and others. I provide support dealing with interpersonal and emotional challenges, managing stress and anxiety responses, and facing the intensity of change, loss, and life's uncertainty.

I engage with you as a compassionate, therapeutic companion, work with you to lift burdens of past traumas, and transform internal patterns that interfere with being present in your life and relationships. I integrate training in trauma and touch into my psychotherapy practice and want to help you live in more accordance with what really matters to you.

Finding the right mental health therapist is not always easy or convenient, but I hope your experience here is different. If you are new to therapy, it might feel uncomfortable talking to a stranger at first. If you have been in therapy for years, you might dread having to "start over" with someone new. Wherever you are in your journey, I will do my best to work with you in a way that is collaborative, integrative, and synergistic.

I specialize in PTSD, complex trauma, and recent traumatic events. After working with me, my clients report feeling calmer, more patient and self-aware, and able to express their own strengths, needs, and limits. They are able to notice how and when they might use internal and external resources.

Is there something you've always hesitated to say out loud, because if you did nothing would stay the same?

Or…

Like in that serenity prayer, are you looking for the difference between what you can change and what you have to accept?

Wisdom's hard to come by in this angry world and serenity can be fleeting. This is your one shot, so you might as well speak your truth. Let’s figure out what you need and what you already have, so you can accept yourself even when it’s hard and participate fully in your own life. What you believe is your Kryptonite may also be the root of your superpower. I'd even bet on it.

Therapy with me can be talky, weepy, a laugh riot, companionable silence. It's my job to understand your world as you see it. We’ll make use of my professional training, life experience, imagination, and intellect to find new perspectives on your relationships, your past, and your present. We’ll experiment with ways for you to manage difficult emotions, feel more compassion toward yourself and others, and live with integrity and purpose.

“You’re perfect just as you are...and you could use a little improvement.” 
-Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

I believe that life is full of paradoxes and that therapy can be a place to explore the complex, and sometimes contradictory, thoughts and feelings in your internal and external world.

I also believe that we each possess a great deal of wisdom that offers guidance in simple (though not necessarily easy) ways for us to embody. Therapy can offer time and space to be heard, seen, and supported exactly as you are, so that you may find a way to move towards where you would like to go.

If you’re feeling stuck, lost, stressed, down, or searching for some form of greater meaning and connection in life, seeking counseling can be a courageous gift to yourself.

I work with individuals, couples, and groups of all ages and stages of life. Some of my areas of interest and experience include: life transitions, existential questions, grief counseling, anxiety and depression, trauma, self-doubt/self-criticism, spiritual yearning, struggles in relationships, finding joy, and searching for life goals/directions.

Have a particular life obstacle you’re trying to overcome? Are you feeling overwhelmed in your situation? As a committed, professional associate Somatic Psychotherapist in San Francisco, your well-being and mental strength is my number one priority. Forming the connection between body and mind is the path to wholeness and healing.

Our relationships with ourselves can be complicated. Together, let’s better understand how your life circumstances have gotten you to where you are today. What is working for you? What is not working for you? How is your relationship with yourself affecting your relationships with others?

The beauty of therapy is that, despite your familiarity or lack of familiarity with psychology, your entry point is exactly where you need to be. Doing deep personal work is accessible to everyone, as long as you are willing to do it. My role as a therapist is to help you find that access point, no matter how new or unfamiliar this process of self-discovery might be for you.

In the midst of this pandemic, you might have moved back home to live with your family and are navigating that transition. Or maybe you are adapting to living on your own. Are you a student, struggling to adapt to doing school online? Perhaps you are non-partnered and are dealing with social isolation. Let’s talk about whatever is coming up for you right now.

Are you struggling in your relationship? Feeling unloved, unheard and unimportant with no hope it will change? This is what typically motivates couples to enter counseling. In session, I help you both to share your needs with each other in a new way to ensure those are heard and understood. This leads to stronger connection and ease of communication outside of session. It doesn’t need to be this hard. I offer a free 15-minute consultation so you can meet me and learn more.

Covid-19/Telehealth Disclaimer

Throughout this extraordinary time my practice will be online. I have found it surprisingly easy to establish a strong emotional connection through video.

Individuals
Among my interests:

• Pandemic fatigue, including pandemic-triggered anxiety and depression (along with pre-existing anxiety and depression)
• Relationship stress exacerbated by shelter-in-place
• Stuckness in work and life
• Harsh inner-critic and the cultivation of self-compassion
• Attachment/childhood trauma and healing
• Intergenerational trauma and healing
• Self-sabotage
• Codependency
• Grief and loss
• Shame, and healing from shame
• Trauma-informed resilience practices
• Nervous system regulation and stress management / distress tolerance
• Mindfulness in everyday life/meditation-in-action
• Creativity and play, and overcoming blocks to inner freedom
• Parts work, multiplicity, and dialectics
• Secular Buddhist psychology
• Unlearning white fragility, toxic masculinity, and white cis hetero American male-body supremacy

Whiteness in Psychotherapy
The couch in my therapy office is occupied mostly by white people. Anxious white people and depressed white people. Obsessive white people and compulsive white people. White people who hurt people and white people who hurt themselves. White people who eat too much, drink too much, work too much, shop too much. White people who are bored, envious, guilty, numb. Racist white people and antiracist white people. White people who look across the room and see a white therapist listening. We talk about everything. Except being white.
—Natasha Stovall, white clinical psychologist

I want to talk about being white.

What does it mean to be white in a society deeply divided by race? How do I feel toward my whiteness, toward the white parts of me? Which of these parts am I willing to look at? Which of these parts am I not ready to see?

White privilege, white advantage, white-body supremacy. White guilt, white shame, white fragility. I want to lean into the uncomfortable exploration of the parts of us as white people we would rather not see, to examine where our feelings toward our whiteness intersect with our uniquely wounded (and resilient) human parts, and to do this in the non-shaming space of the therapeutic relationship. I believe that in exploring our whiteness together we may begin to untrain ourselves from centuries-old implicit bias and more present-day white liberal racism, unlearn our unconscious false sense of superiority, move toward antiracism consciousness, and take antiracist action from a place of internal security, ultimately recovering our full humanity. I believe that for every self-identifying white person this is the therapeutic work of our time.

Informed and inspired by the work of Resmaa Menakem (My Grandmother’s Hands), Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility) and many others, my work for myself as much as my clients begins with tracking, contacting, studying, owning and accounting for the ongoing harmful impact of white-body supremacy on our own minds and bodies as much as that on people of color. The end of this uncomfortable work: unlearning these and all forms of embodied supremacy in the service of true self liberation and soul healing.

Self-identifying as a white cis hetero able-bodied American male, I invite a collaborative investigation into the myriad locations these identities intersect within and between us. While open to all, this part of my practice targets well-intentioned yet unconsciously racist, classist, ableist, misogynistic, queerphobic, xenophobic white men interested in cultivating an ongoing awareness of the ways in which we have been complicit in and continue to perpetuate systemic white cis hetero American male-body supremacy in America and beyond. In the words of Robin DiAngelo, our learning will never be finished.

Couples
Love in the Covid era! Feeling more like roommates these days instead of lovers? Feeling unseen and unheard despite countless hours together? Longing for your partner to really get what you're experiencing in these uncertain times? You are in good company. Passionate about couples work, I can help you and your partner:

• Learn what it is you're really fighting about
• Understand how and why you get stuck
• Repair from the stuckness
• Return to feeling loved, supported, and cared for again

I am a trauma-informed, mindfulness-based, queer-allied and poly-friendly psychotherapist curious about anything and everything being evoked within and between you. Having navigated the serene and stormy seas of my own interracial marriage of over 20 years, I know firsthand the joys and challenges of intimacy in hard times. I want to co-create a space in which you each feel safe to share your deepest relational longing, and for that longing to feel truly seen, heard, felt, and understood—perhaps for the first time.

My work is emotionally-focused and attachment-based. Mindful communication is a passion, as is offering practical tools for sustaining long-term intimacy such as learning and practicing your partner's love languages. It is my experience that couples therapy can have long-lasting positive effects, even from just a few sessions. It is also my experience that it can even be fun!

My practice is informed by the following modalities:

• Hakomi Mindfulness-Centered Somatic Psychotherapy
• Internal Family Systems (IFS)
• Somatic Experiencing (SE)
• Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP)
• Brainspotting
• Mindful Focusing
• Motivational Interviewing & Harm Reduction
• Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
• Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT)
• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
• Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)
• Nonviolent Communication (NVC)
• Authentic Movement
• Family Constellations
• Karuna Training (secular contemplative Buddhist psychology)
• Mindful Schools

Being a human being is complicated, complex, and can sometimes be overwhelming. I can meet you where you are, and together identify where you would like to go, and what parts of yourself you would like to call forward. I can help you explore your inner world, and help you connect your internal experiences to your external experiences. I work well with depression, anxiety, developmental trauma, inner-dynamics, and relational dynamics. I hold space for intersectional identities. You don' t have to be one thing, or move through the world in just one way. Together we can remember your inner richness, and bring those forward.

I am an inclusive, queer person of color who feels comfortable working with adults, couples, and children from all different backgrounds. If you are interested, please contact me for a free 20 minute consultation. Thank you!

I identify as a biracial, bicultural woman of color, born and raised in the Bay Area, and a daughter of immigrants. I encourage the exploration of past experiences and cultural and family stories in order to better love ourselves.

Therapy is a place where you can uncover any barriers that may be limiting your relationship with others and, most importantly, with yourself, in order to find your voice. When we can access and understand our inner thoughts and emotions, we become empowered to make better choices, love fully, and live lighter.

I am keen on working with clients with trauma and helping them to uncover how our bodies and minds store traumatic experiences. Exploring the influence of our past experiences and cultural and family stories on how we love and see ourselves and love and see others is a vital part of my work.

I am a compassionate, direct, and bilingual therapist who will provide you a nonjudgmental space to discover what you need and what does not serve you. My practice is influenced by psychodynamic and strength-based perspectives. I am particularly skilled in working with people who are experiencing anxiety, depression, or tackling social justice issues and who are ultimately seeking the tools for self-empowerment. I am open and excited to work with a wide range of people. I specialize in children, teens, young adults, adults, and Black, Indigenous, women of color.

With curiosity and openness, I work with the developmental, analytical, and mystical aspects of psychotherapy to support your skillful action and to make space for a clearer, deeper connection with who you really are.

Your path in therapy may involve inquiries on the physical, intellectual, psychological, emotional, and spiritual planes.

I will partner with you to work with your present concerns in a safe, supportive, and confidential space. My therapy practice blends psychodynamic talk therapy guidance with holistic tools for grounding and renewal. I work with the following goals: to help you feel more clarity, to guide you in harnessing your internal resources, and to help you find your way back to your true, authentic self. When we work together you will receive openness, analytic reflection, and warmth on my end as we address your hurdles. I am here for you, ready to help and get you back on the path of where you want to be.

I meet with couples, individuals and adolescents from a diverse range of backgrounds struggling to communicate or emotionally connect with others and parts of themselves. Typically, I work with clients that are holding generations worth of grief and trauma without recognizing it. Meeting regularly helps a client and I to discover, together, the conditions that allow for joy or suffering in their life.

In our work together, your whole self is welcome. This may include feelings and experiences that are hard to talk about. I offer warmth, curiosity, and sensitive listening as we approach your hardships. I work with clients who may have experienced challenging familial relationships, and have complex feelings about "home.” I specialize in trauma work and issues of cultural complexity for individuals, couples, and families. Our work together can facilitate transformation and create new possibilities. It would be an honor to support you.

Regardless of our circumstances, we are all capable of healing. I know this because I have experienced it myself and because I have witnessed and accompanied people in untenable conditions deepen awareness about their patterns and access the agency and choice necessary to change. I see therapy as one way to heal backwards through the harm and trauma of our family systems, socialization, and systems of oppression and supremacy that have shaped our behaviors and beliefs. All parts of ourselves deserve to be treated with dignity. I offer a warm, collaborative, grounded and creative space to get curious about how you have been shaped by your experiences, while learning new strategies and skills to move towards acceptance and integration.

The therapy I provide is especially supportive of people experiencing codependency, issues related to identity, depression, anxiety, attachment concerns, addiction (their own and others), and relationship struggles. I specialize in working with people to heal attachment trauma, navigate relationship difficulties and complex family histories, recover from violence, develop boundaries, and take accountability for past harms. In addition to working with individuals and couples, I love working with teenagers, families, queer people, and activists.

I am client-centered and strength-based and integrate a variety of approaches in my work including Gestalt, Somatic, Internal Family Systems, and Narrative Therapy. Past clients have described me as attentive, insightful, strong, direct, and collaborative.

Are you struggling to connect to your partner or important people in your life? Would you like to have deeper, more fulfilling relationships? Maybe you and your partner feel like you are trying to connect and just keep missing each other? Whether you come to therapy on your own or as part of a relationship, I can help you discover deeper connection and more fulfilling bonds.

Restarting your life? Feeling directionless or immobilized by life’s challenges? Are you feeling lost, overwhelmed, isolated? Do you feel stuck in the past as you try to recover and learn from previous relationships? Are you concerned about a lack of motivation in your life? Or maybe you think you are powerless, too old, too young, too different, or low energy?

Scary emotions are often part of the process of change. As a compassionate, supportive, experienced, and trustworthy therapist and guide, I can help. I specialize in life transitions, whether you are leaving a long-term relationship, facing career changes, or the loss of a partner.

I offer a supportive sounding board as you invite change into your life such as:
• Trusting yourself in intimate relationships
• Identifying your right work
• Healing from old wounds
• Learning to put yourself first

Real courage is moving forward when the outcome is uncertain. First steps are hard, but change is possible. Let me help you navigate your journey!

Being a human being is challenging. We are all seeking some sort of reliable refuge. Unfortunately, most of us have internalized the notion that refuge is to be found in external phenomena–other people, places, and things. While these external phenomena can be pleasing, reality dictates that they are inherently impermanent and unsatisfactory. In addition, most of us have internalized our likes and dislikes in ways that have given rise to a crystallized belief in the existence of one’s self, the defense and protection of which may dictate much of our decision-making through adulthood.

I offer unique reality attunement therapy to help my clients move into greater alignment with the natural order of things. Through an integration of cognitive behavioral, Gestalt, and existential approaches, reality attunement therapy will help you move toward an internalized, felt sense of the true, ephemeral nature of things. You will become comfortable with the uncomfortable. You will come to embrace the not-knowing. It is through this attunement to present-moment experience that the discovery of reliable refuge becomes possible. It is my professional calling to help cultivate this grounded sense in others.

I work best with people who are wanting to move towards self-actualization and are open to looking at things from a new perspective. I believe that therapy is a process that takes work outside of our time together. I will hold your personal experiences and understanding in high regard, because I believe you already have what it takes to heal. My role is to help you uncover that strength and knowledge.

Clinical Focus

• Codependency and attachment wounds
• Complex trauma, intergenerational trauma, and PTSD
• Depression
• Anxiety
• Grief and Loss
• Developing strong communication tools
• Burnout, family caregiving stress, or lack of self-care
• Self-acceptance, shame, and guilt
• Spiritual or existential issues
• Harm reduction or abstinence based approaches to substance abuse

I embody a warm, anchored, accepting and male-identified presence. In therapy, I seek to create an environment where you feel safe to share what matters most…your feelings, fears, sadness, hopes, and dreams. Together, I seek to collaborate with you to move beyond coping to a more connected sense of yourself.

I use my adaptive instincts to tailor my approach to your unique needs. To create long-term transformation I primarily use a psychodynamic approach with individuals (understanding how the past is impacting the present and paying attention to our relationship) and Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) with couples. EFT is an evidence based approach the helps couples to deescalate their conflict and rebuild their bonds with each other.

I help Individuals:

• With anxiety and depression to understand the causes of the symptoms, develop strategies to increase functioning in the present and then collaborate with you to address the root causes.
• To manage life transitions including grief and loss, changes in job and life circumstances.
• To address relationship challenges between romantic partners and family members; and to help people feel more connected to themselves and others.

I help Couples:

• To change how they manage conflict, improve communication and increase their connection.
• To heal from instances of infidelity and attachment injury.

Relationships can bring us the greatest joy and support, and the deepest pain and loneliness. We are wired to connect, but sometimes need support around how we connect with others. I work with clients who are looking to heal within themselves, their relationships with their partners, or experience new ways of being in the world.

I work with teens, individuals and couples experiencing loneliness, shame, anxiety, communication issues, self-criticism, depression, burnout and complex trauma.

Relationships are unique and come in countless shapes and sizes over time. Right now, relationships are happening and changing in your life every day. I provide opportunities to explore your relationship to relationships; to gain customized tools for current and future relationships; and to catalyze what is working in your relationships and heal and transform what is painful and challenging.

Yes, all relationships shift and change. Yet love can regenerate again and again in the most mysterious moments and forms when we stay open and curious.

The co-creative journey of intimate relationships is a fundamental part of our human well-being.

You are lovable.

I offer trauma-informed psychotherapy to adults across the lifespan. My areas of focus include, but are not limited to, individuals who are undergoing major life transitions, recovering from traumatic events, experiencing grief or loss, and navigating career or school-related issues. I also specialize in working with those who are directly or indirectly impacted by disability or illness.

As a therapist, I am warm, authentic, understanding, and direct. I use a collaborative and integrative approach rooted in person-centered, biopsychosocial, attachment-focused, trauma-informed, and existential frameworks. I tailor my approach to meet your specific needs as we work together to identify and navigate your path forward.

**COVID-19 Update**
We are living in strange times. COVID-19 has made social distancing a new normal that changes so much about the way we live. However, though keeping distance is a present necessity, our need for connection remains the same. I am still accepting new clients and offering video/phone therapy for all seeking support during these times of uncertainty.

Humans are pack animals. We depend on our relationships to survive. So, when we are deprived of the love and care of supportive relationships, we find ways to meet these needs in their absence. These strategies help us minimize our pain allowing us to survive childhood and navigate adulthood.

Now you are finding that these survival strategies are becoming problems of their own. Do you struggle with letting your guard down, even for the people you love? Is it difficult to put your needs over the needs of others? Have you developed habits of avoiding "feeling" and find that you are disconnected from the world around you?

Therapy offers a unique relationship that invites you to explore your patterns and practice new ways of relating to others. I offer warmth, curiosity, and openness as together we seek out your ideal YOU and explore how to let this person shine through in all your relationships.

Ready to rediscover who you are?

I don't trust myself.

I'm tired of letting opportunities pass by because of self-doubt and tired of the regret I feel afterwards.

I know that changes in actions and beliefs can lead to growth and I realize that greater self-knowledge can help awaken a sense of purpose. But even though I've tried time and time again to develop a sense of empowerment, I'm not reaching my goals.

If any of these statements resonate with you, you're not alone. We live in a society that barrages us with negative external messages that silence our inner knowing— that powerful sense of intuition that rests just beyond our consciousness. When we are disconnected from our intuition, we can lose our sense of purpose.

Rediscovering your inner knowing can be hard work, but I'm here to help. Let’s work on making changes in a way that feels right and supports your process. You’ve been holding on to fear and negative messages. It’s time to let go. Let me help you on this journey.

Aren’t emotions the worst? You're chugging along in your routine that includes all the things you’re supposed to do to be healthy, happy and successful, and then- overwhelming anger or despair pops up out of nowhere! Despite your efforts, you haven't found a way to stop this from derailing and delaying your progress. You are intelligent and disciplined; you don’t need any more self-care tips. What you do need is someone there when you feel out of control, who won’t be intimidated by how deeply you feel and who in fact relishes the opportunity to walk with you on this terrifying and exhilarating journey of being human.