INDIVIDUAL THERAPY
Therapy with me holds in mind the complex layers of what it means to be human in this moment in time, with your particular history. I want to provide you with the space and support to meet whatever you are facing and to resolve unaddressed pain and wounding so you can be freer to live as fully as you desire.
It’s easy to become disconnected.
There are many ways we become disconnected from our own self-knowing. We are born exquisitely vulnerable and from these earliest days, we imprint the sense of how others and our environment will relate to us: whether we feel valued, whether we can trust that even through hard things, we will be accompanied, or whether we anticipate aloneness and the need to abandon our own needs and experience to survive.
We take in messages - from family and from society - around what is and isn’t acceptable to feel or express. We may be left simply too alone and under-supported with challenging experiences to be able to metabolize them. And we live in an increasingly fast-paced and externally-focused culture where slowing down to register the subtle cues of the body and heart is a rare thing.
If we look around us for answers to this predicament, we find ourselves with unprecedented access to information and language for working with the mind and relationships and with what appear to be endless tools at our disposal. Yet so much of all this seems to leave us further away from our selves and more into experiences of inadequacy and isolation.
We are overwhelmed and many of us feel deeply lost and lonely in the midst of it all.
Make space for something new.
We need a different approach. One that does not replicate the pressures to fix ourselves or to be further self-alienated to stay in some form of connection. One that meets the complexity of this moment in your life and the world, and how that intersects with your history and your temperament. One that is generous in its allowance of your deepest self and most alienated places, and in its curiosity about all that you have been through and bring to the table.
We will work together to untangle this complex picture, drawing on different ways of getting to know your inner world that are highly experiential and engaged. Within the laboratory of the therapy relationship, we’ll start to distinguish the signal from the noise. We’ll learn what you’ve taken in as a way of being to stay safe and connected in relationship, and what has been severed from your awareness to achieve that. We get to learn together what helps you connect to and retrieve those parts of your experience lost along the way, and to nourish a more vital and compassionate way of knowing yourself and being in relationship. Our therapy together is a shared creative act that responds to you as a unique and valuable individual.
I invite people of all backgrounds and life experiences to this process. Some of the issues with which I work are detailed below, but I encourage you to reach out for a consultation to discuss your specific situation in more depth.-
Mental Health
• Anxiety & Panic
• Depression
• Trauma, including emotional, physical and sexual abuse
• Bipolar Disorder
• OCD
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Self & Relationships
• Problems in relationships (romantic, coworkers, friendships)
• LGBTQIA+ Issues
• Parenting, Pregnancy & Postpartum
• Caregiving, including therapy for therapists & for those in relationship with a chronically ill person
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Health & Body
• Chronic illness & navigating health issues
• End of life & terminal diagnosis
• Eating disorders & body image
• Burnout
• Sexuality
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Existential Issues
• Grief and Loss
• Climate Anxiety
• Dissatisfaction with work & with a sense of purpose in life
• Creative struggles, procrastination & perfectionism
• Spirituality, including spiritual crisis & a desire to center spirituality more in your life
A note on trauma:
My work with trauma begins with the deepest respect for what it means for you to have lived through that which is unbearable, including all the ways you coped and survived. The chance of being met and accompanied in those places inside is complicated: on the one hand we are often longing to be less alone in the most painful places we carry, but when wounding so often has happened within relationship, we also fear the disappointment of that going badly, or worse, that we’ll be hurt all over again in our most tender places.
I am skilled in working with all the complex dynamics that come with this predicament, and am deeply interested in getting to know what works for you in facing places that may bring shame, terror, and excitement all at once. If you are unsure about whether this type of therapy is a fit for you and your history, I’d be happy to talk it over with you and support you in discerning what might support you on your path.
INDIVIDUAL TherapyFrequently Asked Questions
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We know nowadays that the quality of the therapeutic relationship is the biggest factor in a successful treatment outcome. While this is wonderful to know, it also can put pressure on your choice. Our alchemy might be indicated through how you feel reading through my site, but ultimately the only way to feel into this is to meet. I suggest taking the first 3-4 sessions to get a sense of how we feel together and I will check in with you around this. If our first session shows that we are obviously not a good match and you decide not to continue beyond that initial meeting I will not charge for it to give you more scope to try out different therapists.
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Therapy gives you a dedicated time where you can lay out all of what is on your mind and heart with somebody who is deeply interested in understanding you and who wants to help. There are not many places remaining in our fast-paced and externally-focused culture where we can take the time to privilege our thoughts and feelings in the presence of an attentive other, let alone to grieve, to be angry, to laugh deeply together. By gradually exploring our inner world and our difficulties within the laboratory of the therapy relationship, we can get to the heart of the places that are stuck or unattended, and make space for new, creative possibilities to emerge.
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For a long time research focused on therapy modalities that are more easily studied - meaning short term, protocol-driven treatments. It can be harder to study work that is by its nature open-ended and in many ways subtle. However, this is quickly changing, with increasing evidence that psychodynamic and psychoanalytic therapies are more effective than treatments like CBT for depression and trauma.
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Good and effective depth psychotherapy does take time and you should account for that. While it can feel daunting to invest in therapy, I want to reassure you that I am not interested in keeping you in therapy never-endingly past its expiration date and that I want you to feel more satisfied and authentic in your life and relationships. If you are stuck, we might talk about using an additional modality like Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy to help navigate a plateau. After we meet for a little while and I have more of a sense of the terrain, I can give you more of a sense of how long things might take and what I see as potentially being helpful.
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My strong preference is to meet in person. Having worked in both ways, I find in person therapy to be more effective and I want you to be able to get the most out of our time together. That said, if you have a life circumstance that makes it particularly challenging to get to a specific location regularly, we can talk about virtual meeting options.
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My office is in the Rockridge neighborhood of Oakland. It’s about a 10-minute walk from BART and close to the freeway exit for folks coming to me from further afield.
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Unfortunately not. There are 5 stairs from the street level to the porch which leads into the waiting area. From there the building is all on one floor and there is an ADA bathroom in the waiting area. The other office doors are narrower. I welcome service dogs.
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Please contact me to discuss my current rates, as they vary by service and are often being adjusted. I offer limited sliding scale spots for those who otherwise might not be able to afford treatment and can also help you find somebody within your budget if I am not able to meet your financial needs.
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I am able to give you a monthly detailed receipt of services, called a superbill, which you can submit to your insurance to recoup any out of network reimbursement. You will need to verify with your insurance what your out of network coverage is for mental/behavioral health.
