MEET ANDREA
I am a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, working with individuals and couples in my Oakland-based practice. I blend my interests in psychoanalysis, creativity, and spirituality to offer therapy that centers depth and heart.
My life’s work is about understanding and experiencing the human condition.
My work is undergirded by own journey of recovering from trauma, and shifting away from an outdated foundation of dissociation and external focus. I’ve learned what it means to be a therapist both through my studies and through walking this path myself. I am committed to continuing to deepen my own ability to be present and engaged, both internally and in relationship.
I am here to partner with you in getting to know your own inner world, and what happens when that comes into relationship with others. The therapeutic relationship or your couple relationship often forms a laboratory for this exploration, and I also work extensively with ways of accessing imagination, the body’s knowing, and the ways the unconscious expresses itself in language.
I especially enjoy working with those who have spent so long tuning into the needs of others that they can no longer hear who they are outside of those external voices, and with folks who have a sense of a creative purpose or a deep calling but feel constantly impeded in bringing that to fruition.
MY APPROACHI offer highly-personalized psychotherapy tailored to you as an individual.
I undertook my graduate studies at CIIS, in the Integral Counseling Psychotherapy program, where I was introduced to client-centered and transpersonal approaches to therapy.
My two years of traineeship and internship at the Integral Counseling Center at Pierce St focused on relational, psychodynamic methods, as well as training through intensive group process. During that time, I also trained extensively in methods that center working with emotions and the body. My ketamine training is primarily from Polaris Insight Center.
I work from an engaged and personalized form of relational psychoanalytic therapy that also draws on Buddhist understandings of the mind and Jungian theories of archetypes and the collective unconscious.
I am also influenced by the natural world, the arts, and my life as mother to a young adolescent.
I spent the first decade of my professional life as an acquisitions editor, and have midwifed hundreds of books from idea to publication, supporting authors along the way with all that comes with that process. I also trained as a yoga teacher and taught classes in San Francisco for several years before transitioning to my work as a psychotherapist. My love of books and language and deep respect for the body continue to influence my therapeutic work today.
