"Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures."

Antonio Machado, as translated by Robert Bly

Therapy is weird.

One-on-one meetings that are specifically focused on attending to you are not the sorts of interactions often had in daily life. While moments in therapy can feel somewhat removed from reality, they are also more intimate, alive, and generative than many of the standard encounters you might experience on a day-to-day basis. This requires someone who has the range to meet you where you are, help you identify where you are trying to go, and accompany you through the twists and turns of that trek.

I am not interested in canned therapy interventions, worksheets, step-by-step guides, or linear paths. First and foremost, I am interested in your life story. I believe that everything you have done that has led you to this moment has been an attempt to take care of yourself, whether or not it has yielded the results you hoped for. Seeking out a collaborative partner to support you and your intrapsychic and interpersonal work is a revolutionary act towards understanding how your experiences have shaped you, how you are managing their impacts in the present, and how you can harness your agency in creating yourself and your story going forward.

My background as a massage practitioner and yoga teacher, as well as my graduate training in somatic psychology, brings a holistic perspective to my approach. It’s difficult to talk about the role of the body in psychotherapy without veering into cheesy territory. I endeavor to incorporate somatics into my work in a way that rings true without evoking my own resistance to the disingenuous and pretentious elements that can sometimes be found in body-oriented modalities.   

I enjoy bringing various metaphor systems into the therapy realm, particularly fairy tales, folklore, pop culture, literature, poetry, sitcoms, myth, and the universal archetypes present in these stories. The stories of our lives are implicated in the stories of our societies and cultures, and stories of human experience passed down through generations. Investigating how your personal story is connected to shared stories and experiences provides a sense of kinship, belonging, and novel actionable perspectives.

About

I completed my undergraduate studies at the University of Arizona in 2006 with a dual degree in Creative Writing and French Language and Literature. In 2007, I moved to San Francisco to pursue a master’s degree in Counseling Psychology with an emphasis in Somatic Psychology at CIIS, which I completed in 2010. Throughout this period of time, I also trained and worked as a certified massage practitioner and certified Anusara-inspired yoga teacher. I was drawn to spaces of self-exploration and healing due to my personal and familial experiences with mental health issues. I decided to become a psychotherapist based on what I learned about what did and didn’t work for me as a client. I felt strongly, and continue to feel, that the field needs more representation: it needs clinicians who are not afraid to be human. It is of deep importance to me to be a psychotherapist who can connect with those who are wary of aspects of the therapy process that feel insincere, as well as with those who are inappropriately and unnecessarily pathologized by the field. 

My early training as a psychotherapist took place in community-based settings, including several public schools, a family emergency shelter, and a long-term transitional living home for families. These experiences have given my approach a grounded, pragmatic feel; I like to provide interpretations, recommendations, and reflections that are tangible, accessible, and speak to clients in their own words. As one of my teachers used to say, “If an intervention can’t be done on the side of the road, it’s not worth doing.” I opened my psychotherapy private practice in 2011. In 2017, I entered a doctoral program in Integral and Transpersonal Psychology at CIIS. My research focus involves re-imagining client cases through the lenses of different folk and fairy tales, and exploring the dialectic between creative process and psychotherapeutic work. I ran a full-time, in-person practice in San Francisco until December 2018, when I transitioned to an entirely remote practice. My practice continues to be based in San Francisco; I see clients exclusively online.