Integrative Psychotherapy
for individuals
In-person in Los Feliz and Beverly Hills
Online throughout California
About you
You want to strengthen your relationships. 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 place, where mind, body, and soul are more in alignment and integrity with one another. These changes take courage and are no doubt difficult. It is essential to have support along the way.
My clients are individuals of all ages who are seeking therapy to address issues involving relationships (including friendships, romance, sex, etc.), codependency, perfectionism, anxiety, depression, addictive behaviors, intergenerational wounding, and stage of life confusion.
About me
I am a provisionally-licensed psychotherapist (AMFT#139704), with a focus on psychodynamic and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, which means it’s about building a relationship with you, not just treating your symptoms. I am affirming of all identities, genders, and sexual and religious orientations.
In my free time, I enjoy playing guitar, singing, reading, and spending time in the woods covered with leaves.
Trainings/Memberships
MA Counseling Psychology, Pacifica Graduate Institute, May 2023
Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Training, Student Society Member, October 2024
Training: Mirroring the Four Shields of Human Nature, School of Lost Borders, September 2024
Advanced Training Certificate: Ecotherapy, Pacifica Graduate Institute, May 2022
100-hour Yoga Nidra Certification, 2019
200-hour Yoga Alliance Certified Teacher Training, 2018
“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 You
We are born inextricably bound to systems. For better or worse, we are created and reflected and created again within the systems in which we live. Our family of origin, our neighborhood, our schools, the mainstream culture, all contributed to our development and to who we have become.
And yet, in order to survive, emotionally and, sometimes, physically, some of us early on needed to adapt our essence in order to fit into the systems around us. For some of us this meant pretending to be someone else entirely; for others, this meant dimming our lives and our lights, our creative interests and expressions. In service of the biological and evolutionary need to belong, we ceased to belong to ourselves.
Some people live in this dim false-self state of inauthenticity their entire lives. Others have a gnawing sense at some point that something is in fact not okay, and, as a result, begin to pay attention to an inner calling towards a new way of being, though unknown and undefined. Most of the time, answering this call means walking away, literally or metaphorically, from the systems which, up until now, had kept us “safe”.
Enter the Divine Outcast. While it may appear that this archetype does not belong, they in fact are stepping toward belonging to themselves. By committing to your own authenticity, you can develop the courage and strength to walk the sometimes lonely path toward true belonging. However, this path is not for the faint of heart, and it can be helpful to have a guide to walk along this path with you.
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Offerings
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.