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About My Clients
I love that therapy is relational; there are many things we can do by ourselves, and some that require the witness, encouragement, collaboration, and guidance of someone else. I'm constantly impressed, humbled, and gratified by the kinds of changes my clients are able to make with the help of effective, supportive therapy. I work with clients who want to create life paths that fit who they are, even if that means rejecting dominant messaging and making something new for themselves.
My Background and Approach
I joke that I practice and preach "the gospel of dialectical perspective." This comes from my experience with DBT, and goes beyond just the skills that DBT offers--skills that can be extremely helpful in their own right, but are no substitute for cultivating the ability to acknowledge the simultaneous contradictions in the world. The more we can do that, the better we get at so many crucial things: allowing ourselves to experience the fuller range of our feelings; softening perfectionism; transforming relationships instead of losing them; making sense of scary and painful events, both past and current; creating sustainable behavior patterns. I also think that story-telling has immense therapeutic potential--not just articulating our own stories to ourselves, but learning how to share those stories with others, and how to connect with other people's stories as sources of community and self-understanding.
My Personal Beliefs and Interests
I'm particularly passionate about the importance of relationships in our lives--familial, social, professional, and/or intimate--though I don't believe there's one right way to "do" relationships, or an ideal breadth or depth people should achieve in them. I want to see people be able to configure their constellation of connections in whatever manners they think are best--so long as others' rights to safety and self-determination are respected--because relational fulfillment has so much impact on our mental health.