How I Approach Therapy

As a client, therapy can be life-changing, healing, and transformative. Therapy is also hard. It can be hard opening up about feeling ashamed. It can be hard to discuss certain behaviors or past experiences that have generated tremendous pain. It can be hard to trust or believe that therapy will really make a difference. So, first and foremost, I try to approach therapy with a real appreciation for both the wonders and the challenges of being in therapy. I feel genuinely honored to walk alongside my clients as they traverse challenging emotional territory. I believe it takes immense strength and courage to confront the past and present realities of life.

I believe healing optimally occurs through kind, warm, compassionate relationships and hope to create a therapeutic environment in which the client experiences a new sense of emotional safety. I consider therapy to be successful when a client can develop a greater understanding of their past and current behaviors and this understanding leads to concrete changes. With greater understanding, we can act with a newfound level of autonomy and intention.

With all clients, I tailor my approach to the specific needs of the person. However, there are some overarching beliefs and principles that influence how I approach therapy:

• The Unconscious Mind: Our unconscious mind has the ability to significantly influence our lives and behavior. The more we can create conscious awareness of what was previously unconscious, the more likely we are to heal.

• Treating the Whole Person: I believe symptoms have meaning and that therapy involves treating the whole person, not symptoms. For example, if someone has depression, there are reasons for the depression. It is important to go beyond trying to address symptoms, instead trying to get to the underlying meaning and core experience that has created the symptoms. As a brief example, a symptom reduction approach might involve the person with depression engaging in an exercise program in order to decrease the symptom of low energy. While I am in full support of an exercise program, I believe it is more important to understand why the person developed low energy (as examples: the work environment is depleting; the person experienced early loss; a romantic relationship feels exhausting, etc.).

• Emotional Safety: healing best occurs in an environment of emotional safety, which involves the client believing the therapist is dependable, trustworthy, compassionate, and empathetic.

• Undoing Aloneness: I believe that if the client feels emotionally safe and can trust in the therapist as a sturdy, dependable person, clients can face emotions and experiences that may have previously been too painful or scary to face alone.

In case terminology is helpful, the following have been especially influential for my theoretical/conceptual approach to therapy: relational psychoanalysis, object relations, attachment, control mastery theory.

About Me

I am a Licensed Clinical Psychologist in California (PSY 31921). I received my doctorate from the Rutgers Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology, considered to be one of the best Psy.D. programs in the country. I completed my APA-accredited pre-doctoral internship at the University of Southern California Counseling and Mental Health Center and my post-doctoral fellowship at Loyola Marymount University’s Student Psychological Services.

I have experience working in private practice, college counseling, community mental health, intensive outpatient treatment, a psychoanalytic training institute, and a substance use treatment program and am comfortable with a wide range of mental health concerns. I have training in Psychoanalytic Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Motivational Interviewing (MI), and Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS) approaches to chronic pain, especially chronic back pain. I generally practice from a psychoanalytic framework while focusing on tailoring my therapy approach to the unique needs of every client.

On a more personal note, I genuinely love being a therapist. I am truly privileged to work with and accompany diverse people along the journey to healing and flourishing.

Specialties

I have wide-ranging clinical interests and have worked with diverse clients and mental health concerns. One of the reasons I deeply appreciate psychoanalytic theory is the emphasis on the whole person and the idea that symptoms and disorders have meaning in the greater context of the person’s life. Therapy involves treating the whole person, and there are many people I work with that do not fit neatly into a mental health category, nor do they need to. With that being said, some special areas of clinical focus include:

• Alcoholism and Substance Use

• Anxiety

• Chronic Pain (TMS/PPD)

• Depression

• Men’s Issues

• Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

• Relationship Issues

• Trauma