Getting Started
If we determine that we are a good fit for your therapy, I will join you as ally and guide, meeting you where you are with consideration, warmth, focus, and skill.
Depending on the urgency with which you initially come in, it may be necessary to first focus on calming overwhelming feelings or finding practical solutions to immediate matters.
We may then decide to continue and explore further and understand more deeply your struggles as well as your advantages – your story and overall experience of you in the world.
It takes practice.
If curious, willing, and practicing inner work routinely, you will grow to find acceptance, tenderness, and greater emotional flexibility within yourself.
With enhanced insight and greater clarity, you will feel more confident, encouraged, inspired – an affirmative experience ultimately leading to improvement of symptoms, overcoming stuck places, and achieving purposeful changes aligned more harmoniously with your situation and aspirations.
What we nurture in ourselves will grow; that is nature’s eternal law.
~Goethe
Always at the heart of my practice is providing my clients with a meaningful space where I engage them to develop deeper understanding of their circumstance and find their way forward.
How I work
I thoughtfully tailor treatment to meet your unique needs and goals, and integrate different therapeutic techniques as they are called for including cognitive behavioral and other solution-focused and mindfulness methods.
My main approach, however, is informed by psychoanalytic psychotherapy – a form of talk therapy, which values self-examination and enhanced awareness as disciplines by which healing, lasting change, and personal growth are stimulated.
In psychoanalytic therapy, our partnership, the therapist-client relationship, is considered central to the healing process and significant in moving your treatment forward toward meeting your therapy goals and beyond.
Also called psychodynamic psychotherapy, this treatment approach – for which I received advanced training – typically requires that you and I meet 1-3 times a week. While more frequent sessions keep the therapeutic experience fresher and more focused, how often we meet is a topic we decide on together.
A few words on mindfulness practices and psychotherapy
I most often encourage people I work with to enhance their therapy with meditation or other mindfulness practices.
I find such practices to infuse the process of mental and emotional healing with vital and life-affirming energy. Both engage us to learn about the inner workings of our minds and allow space to recognize, accept, forgive, heal, strengthen, elevate, and invite fulfillment and greater joy in living.
ABOUT ME
Meaningful encounters on my personal and professional journeys with psychotherapy, science, and art – all through a multicultural and international lens – have helped me understand life in ways that inspired my desire to help others sort through life’s struggles and perplexities.
I hold a master’s degree in Marriage and Family Therapy from Alliant International University, San Diego (2014), and received advanced training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy from the San Diego Psychoanalytic Center (2017).
Prior to opening the doors to my private practice, I worked extensively in San Diego mental health community clinics, organizations, and schools – providing individual, couple, and group therapy in addition to crisis intervention – to homeless veterans, domestic violence perpetrators and victims, children and adolescents, and the general population. Treatment was provided in both residential and outpatient settings.
In 2022 I completed the Eating Disorders, Compulsions & Addictions program (EDCAS) of the William Alanson White Institute in New York. It is one example of my commitment to professional development and participation in various seminars and conferences centering on psychodynamic, mindfulness, and expressive arts practices and therapies.