Services
- Individual
About My Clients
I help healthcare workers and other professionals to recover from work-related stress and anxiety, burnout, compassion fatigue, and vicarious traumatization. I also help people to heal from relational disruption or loss, life transitions, familial stress, and problems of people-pleasing, perfectionism, and impostor syndrome. Many of my clients grapple with occupational and social stress/trauma related to intersectionalities of gender, race, sexuality, class, and chronic illness.
My Background and Approach
I love to help my clients find new ways to think about and to take action around their problems, to make choices aligned with their values, and to feel more empowered, energetic, and emotionally available in all parts of their lives. My specialty treatment of healthcare professionals is informed by training and relevant research and theory, but also by 20 years of experience working in a range of healthcare settings, providing direct services to patients in specialty mental health and primary care clinics, supervising and teaching psychology externs, interns, and postdoctoral fellows, psychiatry residents, nurse practitioners, and social work interns, and working on a number of interdisciplinary clinical teams with physicians, nurses, and allied health practitioners. IMPORTANT NOTE: Because I now live in Madison, WI, my treatment of clients in California will remain teletherapy-based even after resolution of the COVID pandemic.
My Personal Beliefs and Interests
I have seen too many incredibly gifted professionals leave their fields because they feel utterly depleted and demoralized. And to add insult to injury, they are often beset by shame and self-blame, because they’ve been led to believe that burnout is caused by a failure of self-care, that compassion fatigue is caused by a failure of empathy, that vicarious trauma is caused by a failure of personal professional boundaries. But work-related stress syndromes are much more complicated than that, especially for professionals with intersectional identities that have been underrepresented or undervalued. I have found that resolving work stress, burnout, and related problems requires attention not only to the self of the professional, but also to the institutions and systems in which they have lived and worked. I am pro-BLM, pro-intersectional feminism, pro-immigrant rights, and am allied with LGBTQ communities.