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.

I have taken a less traditional path of healing and study on the journey toward being a therapist. Alongside my professional career, I studied and practiced several modalities of touch and body-oriented therapy; completed somatic experiencing (SE) trauma resolution training and worked with clients as an SE practitioner; studied shamanism in the Peruvian plant medicine tradition; and practice a yogic form of Tibetan Buddhism. I began graduate school a few years before my retirement, propelled by my desire for a licensed private practice as a second career.

I began working through Grateful Heart in 2016, where I integrate somatic psychology with my trauma, body-oriented training. I lean on my spiritual practice for personal support and bring spirituality into my practice when appropriate. I am a California native, long-time Bay Area resident, local sports fan, and environmental volunteer. I have been married, raised a family, and now enjoy being a grandparent.

My interest in helping others learn and grow started when I was very young, but it has been a lifelong journey learning to live in my own skin, to transform traumatic events into healing, and gain confidence in myself in relationship with others.

I have a master’s degree in counseling psychology. Over 20 years I have trained with the founders of regenesis, somatic experiencing, visionary cranial sacral therapy, psycho-physical therapy and accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP) for couples.

My approach is relational, holistic, somatic, and body-oriented, integrating bodily sensations and movement with cognitive and emotional processes to promote wholeness, increase interpersonal functioning, and help resolve psychotherapeutic concerns.

We all develop adaptive strategies to cope with childhood experiences, traumatic events, unresolved grief and loss, emotional and relational wounds, and lack of consistent support. The therapeutic process may help you resolve or put some of these concerns in the past. This can allow you access to a broader range of emotions through felt sense experience and more freedom to choose how you react and interact under stress. You may also experience a greater sense of confidence and security in connection with yourself and others.

I try to live in accordance with the values I hold dear. These include being kind, open, and honest; respecting others; and being willing to examine my beliefs, prejudices and triggered emotions in order to own my experience and make my actions and reactions more conscious. I deeply value relationships where safe, honest connection can happen, which demands ongoing commitment to inner work. Out of necessity and desire to grow, I have learned to work and bend with the rhythms of age, stages of life, health, and creative forces. In our troubled world, I hope that wisdom and compassion prevail, including taking collective responsibility to protect human dignity and sustain a living planet.

Most important to my therapy practice is to build a foundation of safety, understanding and respect through grounded presence and awareness, allowing clients to engage, explore, and grow based on their unique set of values, desires, goals and life experience.

• Adults: 25-65
• Seniors: 65+

• Individuals
• Premarital Couples
• Couples

• First Responders
• Interfaith Couples
• Persons Experiencing Grief and Loss
• Persons Recovering from Traumatic Events/Experiences
• Persons with Histories of Childhood Sexual Abuse
• Persons with Disabilities
• Persons with Disabilities

• Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP)
• EMDR
• Somatic Experiencing
• Somatic Psychotherapy
• Other:

• Cash
• Check
• Credit Card

$140

$75-$120

Yes

(510) 665-4815

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4797 Telegraph Avenue Suite #203 Oakland, CA 94609

• Monday Morning
• Monday Afternoon
• Monday Evening
• Tuesday Morning
• Tuesday Afternoon
• Tuesday Evening
• Wednesday Morning
• Wednesday Afternoon
• Wednesday Evening

To learn more about my practice or schedule an appointment, please call or e-mail. I will respond as soon as possible. I see clients on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I typically schedule individual sessions for 50 minutes, and couples for 75 minutes, with exceptions as agreed. I offer a sliding scale to help make therapy affordable and sustainable. I will let you know the days, times and sliding scale openings available at the time you contact me. My office is accessible only by stairs.

11/15/22