Services
- Individual
- Couples
- Adolescent/Teen
About My Clients
I enjoy working with people from diverse ethnic, neurodivergent, gender, sexual orientation and/ or kinkiness backgrounds. Most individuals I work with have multiple experiences of trauma in their background that make their challenges seem more complicated and overwhelming to solve. I find that many times, drawing on my years in community mental health, I am able to help people understand why they repeat these unhealthy patterns and create an individualized path for them to change their pattern.
My Background and Approach
I have over 12 years experience as a therapist and over 30 years experience practicing mindfulness. I have cofacilitated DBT groups, created and led mindfulness groups in English and Spanish, and also co-facilitated a batterer intervention group in Spanish for 6 years. I am trained in and utilize EMDR for working with trauma. I also bring in somatic work, including Somatic Experiencing based methods. Later in my career I became trained in Imago Relationship Therapy and have found it extremely useful as a couples therapist as well as individual work. I also use Polyvagal Theory as a foundation to checking the nervous system state as a part of my client's mindfulness practice. Finally, I have found over the years that the therapy relationship itself is an important tool. This means that I don't maintain a distance but share part of my own experiences, as they are therapeutic. That is to say, I keep a professional level of familiarness.
My Personal Beliefs and Interests
I believe in the inherent goodness of all people but also am conscious that we all have our shadow sides. I have come to understand, in a lived way, that all behavior is an adaptation of a person to an environmental context. Thus, every behavior can be understood as a way of a person responding to their environment, most usually the foundation was laid in early childhood. This means that I have never worked with a broken person who needed fixing. It means that to find a meaningful life, we have to come to understand why we make sense and then we can begin to practice integrating the newly understood "reality" of our life with the rest of our life.