I have been working in the field of mental health since 2011. My background includes working with adults, children, families and couples in school-based and community contexts, focusing on issues related to complex trauma, cultural oppression, grief and loss, and domestic violence. I remain keenly interested in the ways systems of oppression and privilege impact clients’ lives, and I try to understand people’s suffering and healing in the context of the systems and cultures within which we live. 

Informed in recent years by my own journey into parenthood, I also have a particular passion for supporting women and parents of all genders through the immense waves of the perinatal period (trying to conceive, pregnancy & pregnancy challenges/loss, birth, postpartum and early parenthood) and matrescence. I cherish the support that comes through building community around these experiences. I have received training through Postpartum Support International on therapeutically supporting those struggling with perinatal mood and anxiety challenges and the many changes of this period in life. As a mother myself, I am immersed in parenting community, and I seek to bring both my professional and personal perspectives into my work with new mothers and parents. 

The tools I bring for my work as a therapist are: my humility, my empathetic presence, my playfulness, my willingness to listen and be told when I'm getting it wrong so I can adjust to support you in a fuller way, my intuition, and the skills and training I've integrated into my being in the past decade of becoming a therapist. My toolbox also includes the deep lessons from the at-times grueling lessons of parenthood. Additionally, I have previously worked as a certified domestic violence counselor, and bring my background and experience of working with survivors of intimate partner violence to my work as a therapist.

My particular therapeutic interests include:

-motherhood/parenthood and the identity transitions inherent in the perinatal period 

-healing around grief and loss, coping with ambiguous grief

-identifying, unlearning and healing from harmful internalized narratives from systems of oppression

-supporting explorations of queerness

-supporting folks in healing from intimate partner violence and abuse

-supporting healing from single-incident and also complex trauma using the modality of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)

I am a member of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (CAMFT), and a learner with the Institute for the Development of Human Arts (IDHA), which seeks to transform the mental health system and those who work within it. I am inspired by IDHA’s work, which takes a radical approach, affirming the following:

“Transformative mental health requires challenging ingrained narratives that keep us individually and collectively stuck -- narratives that claim some groups of people are inherently superior to others; that we can harm others without harming ourselves; that marginalized people get what they deserve; that widespread abuse is disconnected from trauma; and that the forces creating inequality should be dictating the solutions to it.”