Services
About My Clients
Some households are held together by a bargain no one dares examine. Questions are met with cruelty, and the child who asks becomes the problem. Children raised this way learn to ask for less and to doubt their own seeing. The desire does not go away. It goes quiet. Many of the people I work with function well and have been through several courses of treatment, each of which stopped at symptom relief. What they learned was how to survive a situation, which is not the same as living.
My Background and Approach
I work psychoanalytically and over a long horizon, without a protocol or a set agenda. Much of what happens is questioning the terms you arrive with, including the ones you were handed about yourself. Trauma is often treated as an event to be processed. What I see is closer to a condition someone grew up inside. The relationship is part of the material: most people I see were injured early, so repair happens in one. That means someone who stays and who will not hand you a formulation to accept. I interned at the Philadelphia Consultation Center and completed my clinical hours in community mental health, mostly with people after hospitalization and with severe developmental histories, followed by a two-year fellowship at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. Complex trauma, dissociation, self-harm, and presentations described as borderline remain the center of my caseload.
My Personal Beliefs and Interests
Most people arrive knowing more about their own lives than they have been given credit for, and the capacity to tolerate doubt is worth more than certainty about what is wrong. Certainty is usually what a person has already been handed, and it has not helped. I often work with highly sensitive, perfectionistic adults who feel set apart from others, and with those failed, refused, or quietly discarded by the institutions they passed through. Much of this work involves finding language for what has been unspeakable. People often fear that therapy means endlessly deconstructing the past. My interest is in what gives way under pressure, and in what a person can build that cannot be revoked. I aim to provide a space that disrupts unspoken rules, encourages improvisation, and empowers people to move from endurance to possibility. There is no telling how long that takes, but I will not keep anyone longer than necessary. Therapy is a refuge, so more of life becomes possible outside it.