About Me

I believe in using my passion, insight, creativity, warmth, experience, and even occasionally humor, to build productive, meaningful and collaborative relationships with my clients. My approach is gentle, respectful, interactive, experiential, and collaborative.

I offer both long-term depth counseling as well as brief and strategic short-term counseling for individuals, couples and families.

My approach to therapy is largely based on my basic beliefs about human nature and the nature of human suffering. In general I believe:

• that there is a natural and innate force in us that wants to unfold organically towards greater degrees of wholeness and integration; driving us forward to fulfill our individual and unique potential,
  
  
• that therapy helps midwife this process by both reconnecting us to and removing the blocks to this organic unfolding,
  
  
• that the ultimate goals of therapy are to help reconnect us to our own innate aliveness, to bring that aliveness into the world, and to find a deep compassion for ourselves and others.
  

My role I believe is to partner with you in meeting your goals while serving as a genuine, objective and empathetic guide. To do this I integrate complementary methodologies and techniques based on each person's unique situation to offer a highly personalized approach. Eclectic by nature, I tend to gravitate towards humanistic/ existential, transpersonal, family systems, strategic, and cognitive behavioral approaches.

My work as a Marriage and Family Therapy Intern includes treatment specializations including:

Life Transitions
Grief Counseling
Depression/Anxiety
Adult ADD
Relationships and Intimacy
Self-Esteem
LGBT Issues
Spirituality
Trauma and PTSD
Creative Inspiration and Blocks
Stress Management
ACA/codependency
Spiritual Growth
Life Coaching

Work Experiences: Jewish Family and Children's Services of Long Beach, providing services to adults, children and families at community agency; Hospice of Marin, providing individual and group bereavement counseling to persons suffering from a recent loss; Dominican University of California, providing individual psychotherapy and psycho-educational trainings for students and staff of University community; Board of Directors, Horizons Foundation; philanthropic organization dedicated to serving the San Francisco Bay Area; Co-Facilitator, HIV+ Drop in Support Group, New Leaf Services; Hotline Operator, SF AIDS Foundation; Research Assistant, Center for AIDS Prevention Studies - UCSF

Workshops & Trainings:

• Evolution of Psychotherapy Conference
• EMDR, Beginning Level 1
• EMDR, Beginning Level 2
• Cognitive Behavioral Treatment of Depression
• Spousal/Partner Abuse Assessment and Treatment
• Clinical Use of Role-Play Action Methods Drawn from Psychodrama
• Shame & It's Implications for Psychotherapy
• Mental Health, Aging and Long-Term Care
  Invoking the Sage, Center for Story and Symbol
• The Tornado Within: Exploring the Connections Between Children's Anger, Unresolved Grief and Escalating Violence
  Experiencing the Unconscious - C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles
  Dancing the Transference, Understanding & Applying a Core
• PsychotherapeuticConcept Across Multiple Treatment Approaches and Modalities
  16th International Transpersonal Conference
• Enlightened Duality Series: Huston Smith,
  Embodying the Buddha; Venerable Robina Coutrin
• Buddhism Behind Bars; John Welwood, Relationship as Spiritual Crucible
  LAGPA Annual Conference

Education:

• Master of Science, Counseling Psychology, specialization in marriage, family and child counseling at Dominican University of California. Recipient of the Psi Chi Award.
• Bachelor of Arts, Psychology, Dominican University (1989)
• Courses in British Architecture and Drama, Cambridge University (1987)
• Undergraduate coursework in Social Ecology, University of California, Irvine (1982 -1984)
• Courses in Modern British Politics and Mahatma Gandhi, Oxford University (1982)

Affiliations:
Member California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (CAMFT)
Chapter Member, Long Beach-South Bay CAMFT
Member, Psi Chi, National Honor Society in Psychology