Integrative Psychotherapy

for adults and adolescents

In-person in Beverly Hills and Los Feliz

Online throughout California

About you

Do you want to strengthen your relationships? Find your tribe of friends? Change unhelpful patterns of thinking and behavior? Accept yourself without shame or judgement? Identify and see through layers of cultural programming to uncover your inner truth? Allow yourself to be loved? Live from a more intentional and integrated place, where mind, body, and soul are in alignment and integrity with one another?

My clients are individuals of all ages who are seeking therapy to address issues including relationships, identity, anxiety, depression, codependency, body dysmorphia, and stage of life questions.

About me

For the past two decades I have been a seeker, and I have found this work by following my curiosity and learning, painfully at times, how essential it is to live life with an open heart.

After over a decade of working as an educator in both public and private K-12 schools, I received my MA in Counseling Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, where I trained in psychodynamic psychotherapy. I am affirming of all identities, genders, and orientations.

In my free time, I enjoy playing guitar, singing, reading, and spending time in the woods covered with leaves.

“And we are put on earth a little space, that we may learn to bear the beams of love.”

-William Blake

How Therapy Can Help

Everyday we are bombarded with messages telling us who we should be, how we should look, and what we should do in order to be acceptable, worthy of love, and okay. Without help, it can feel lonely and overwhelming to navigate these ‘shoulds’ and decide whether our choices are coming from a place of fear or from our authentic truth.

Therapy provides a space where, through the safety of the therapeutic relationship, you can explore those parts of yourself you may have learned, consciously or unconsciously, to keep hidden. It is often these parts which hold the key to a more courageous, creative, and satisfying life.

My mission is to guide individuals through this exploration, drawing from several therapeutic modalities which integrate the mind, body, and soul. Through accessing the present moment and developing greater awareness of your personal values, habits, and beliefs, you can increase the capacity to choose who you want to be, rather than have it be chosen for you.

The therapy relationship is also a unique opportunity to better understand patterns in your relationships. It provides a container to learn how to safely address conflict, have uncomfortable conversations, and learn how to set and maintain personal boundaries. It is a space where, in a sense, we can become more human together.

↓

Offerings

  • Psychodynamic psychotherapy is a type of therapy that takes into account the influence of the unconscious on one's thoughts, behaviors and experience of the world. Therapy from this perspective can help with a variety of problems, such as understanding motivation and procrastination; confusion about big decisions; and/or feeling stuck and trapped in toxic cycles of addiction and self-destructive behaviors. Through interventions that acknowledge another intelligence beyond what we think we know, a person can arrive at more creative solutions and a greater self-awareness and understanding.

  • Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT, is a form of therapy that is aligned with some core aspects of secular Buddhism. It can help with disorders that result from rigid thinking, such as anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. ACT interventions aim to develop psychological flexibility through six key processes, including defusion (creating some space from thoughts rather than immediately identifying with them); acceptance; attention to the present moment; self-awareness; identification of personal values; and committed action to living out those values.

  • Influenced by the philosophy of Existentialism from 19th and 20th century Europe, Existential Therapy is a type of talk therapy which focuses on the inevitable conflicts and anxieties that arise from being a human in a body, subject to impermanence, loss, and loneliness. This type of therapy can help an individual to grieve after the end of a close relationship or move forward after suffering a personal loss. Through authentic therapeutic conversations about free will, choice, and responsibility, a person can uncover the story they tell themselves about how the world works and make a choice about personal meaning and purpose in the face of impermanence.

  • Through increasing awareness of the “felt sense” of internal physical sensations, an individual can both become more present in their body and become more in touch with moment-to-moment experience, likes and dislikes, what makes them feel alive and expansive and what makes them feel contracted and closed off. By practicing this continued attention to body sensation both within sessions and throughout daily life, a person can become more attuned to who they are.