I offer therapy for when insight alone hasn’t healed the parts that hurt.

My clients often tell me that they feel seen and heard by me in a way they haven’t been before. They are able to set aside the versions of themselves they show the world and allow the often wounded or tender, unexplored parts to peek out. They tell me that they are able to more deeply heal their wounds rather than just learn to cope with them.

I work from an experiential, emotion-friendly and attachment-based approach, which means we will do work in the room rather than just talk about your past. My goal is to help you have a new experience of old wounds rather than just understand them, and to use our work together to help you show up in new ways in your life today.

I will push on the stuck places to help you move toward healing, but always collaboratively and with deep appreciation for the essential you that may not yet have fully emerged. I bring a warm, grounded presence and we may find ourselves laughing in session as well as exploring the more painful parts you may not have previously shared. We frequently will find parts of you that once protected you but may not still serve the life you live today. Together, we'll make room for the you that may have gotten lost beneath what you've needed to survive.

I believe in the power of the therapeutic relationship. Many of us have never experienced the power of being nonjudgmentally seen and heard, or what it is like to reveal our deepest fears and vulnerabilities in that context. I won't be a blank slate that replicates the "not known" feeling you may experience in the world. Therapy is a relationship, and like any other relationship, it depends on trust.

I enjoy working with a wide variety of people and offer an inclusive, affirming practice. I offer a special welcome to those who are tired of their trauma running their lives, people pleasers who look good from the outside but feel disconnected and alone, and men who are concerned that therapy may not be friendly to men. I also enjoy working with couples with a "we-focused" approach that helps reconnect you with why you came together and what you appreciate about one another, particularly those navigating the challenge of blending families.

I hold an MA in Marriage and Family Therapy from Sentio University, an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College, and a BA in English Literature from UC Berkeley. I have completed advanced training in Emotion-Focused Therapy and AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy), and my work is also informed by Internal Family Systems (IFS), the Ideal Parent Figure attachment repair protocol, memory reconsolidation, and PACT (a Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy). While these approaches differ in many ways, they all recognize that lasting change comes through new emotional experiences, not insight alone.

I believe that understanding is overrated. For most of my life, I turned to intellectual understanding to address my problems, but it never fully worked and it definitely didn't get me closer to people. Now I see insight as part of the journey, valuable but incomplete without new experiences that heal the pain at the source.

As someone who has experienced transformational change in my own life, I am an unabashed believer in it. I come to this work having experienced profound transformational change through therapy and other modalities. My wish for my clients is always that they too can come to feel the profound ease of comfort in their own skins.