Services
About My Clients
I'm drawn to clients who long for their lives to change, and those with traumatic histories of feeling like they're "too much," "not enough," or like they don't matter. These wounds often manifest as anxiety, depression, trauma, self-defeating, intense emotions, perfectionism, relationship issues, suicidal ideation, self-injury, and dependencies. As a mixed race, non-binary, abolitionist therapist, I aim to make intentional space for LGBTQIA2S, BIPOC, chronically ill / disabled folks.
My Background and Approach
My primary modality is C-DBT (Contextual Dialectical Behavior Therapy) (an adapted version of DBT). C-DBT differs from traditional DBT in that we don't focus on replacing behaviors with skills. Instead, we examine your history of surviving environments with certain coping behaviors and explore how well they work now. Together we'll discover patterns of escape and avoidance, and the core wounds they're attempting to manage. Through mindfulness, validation, and emotional experiencing, we will learn to interact with your mind and history differently to decouple unhelpful behaviors from your triggers. As you experience more freedom from your core wounds, you'll experience more agency to organize your life around what matters to you, be it relationships, meaningful work, family, etc. My practice is deeply relational and integrates emotional experiencing techniques from Somatic Therapy and mindfulness processes from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Functional Analytic Therapy.
My Personal Beliefs and Interests
I never thought I would practice behavioral therapy when I joined the field. As an abolitionist who learned about the harm of the medical industrial complex, I thought behavior therapy was inherently racist, ablest, sanist; that it was all about conforming people to assimilate better. Yet, as I started practicing with queer/trans folks and BIPOC/ colonized folks, I realized that many of us (myself included) do need support with our behaviors. Worry, rumination, self-defeat, pushing people away, fixating, trying to be perfect, numbing, SI - these are all ways we are trying to cope with being made to feel disposable or wrong. And after seeing how saturated the behavioral field was by non-marginalized people, I decided I wanted to learn this style while centering my values of PIC abolition, anti-imperialism and colonialism, disability justice (including COVID precautioning), queer and trans liberation, mad liberation, harm reduction, fat liberation, and transformative justice in my work.