About Me
When I was a kid. I used to snoop around other people's houses any chance I could get. I'd walk around and look at all of their things, trying to piece together some idea of who they were and what was important to them. This sense of curiosity and desire for truth and understanding has never left me. I still look at people's "stuff," just in a different, and certainly more meaningful way. Now, I am lucky enough that people bring their own stuff to me willingly, so that we may look at it, turn it around in our hands, and make sense of it together.
My pursuit of this work has been driven, in large part, by my own challenges, some of which began in early childhood (maybe that's why I was distracting myself with other people's knick-knacks!). I struggled along the way with "too-big" feelings, a sense of not belonging, unbearable loneliness, being outside of my own body, and thinking myself out of happiness a thousand times but never once into it. Being a human is hard, getting to a place where you feel like a human is even harder and I am a fellow traveler on that journey.
What I know for sure is that therapy is a place where these moments of painful human experience become invaluable lessons I can share with others. It is a space where I can take the things I was told were weaknesses and turn them into my most powerful strengths. And I will choose that every day of the week.
My Approach
The best advice I ever received about practicing psychotherapy was, “be a human first and a therapist second." To this day, I hold this sentiment in mind while sitting with my clients. While my work is informed by robust training in depth psychology and psychoanalytic thought, I ultimately hold the view that you are the expert on your own life - my skillset is in guiding conversations so that you may discover things for yourself, with my support. My goal is to provide a safe space in which to challenge yourself and heal - I do this by taking a warm, but direct, approach in our conversations. My clients and I laugh a lot together too.
I focus on helping people separate their preferences from their problems, identify values that are most important to them, and determine the actions that will best express those values. I utilize the relationship between us to help you develop a stronger, more truthful relationship with yourself. From a place of deep awareness, you will feel more empowered to make choices that are right for you, more congruence, connection, and authenticity in your life, more freedom from what burdens you, and more control over your story.
In my work, I use an integrative approach, combining concrete skills-based interventions, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectic Behavior Therapy (DBT) and Exposure Response Prevention (ERP) with somatic modalities, such as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Internal Family Systems (IFS) and Polyvagal Theory. The framework I use to bring it all together is grounded in relational and humanistic thought, as well as depth psychology.
EDUCATION, CREDENTIALS, & CERTIFICATIONS:
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist in CA #97100
BA UCLA, Interpersonal Communication Studies
MA University of Southern California, Marriage & Family Therapy
Former Program Director, Center For Discovery ED PHP/IOP
Adjunct Professor, Pepperdine University
Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) Trained
Internal Family Systems (IFS) Trained
Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) Trained
Trauma Resiliency Model (TRM) Trained
Founder/Owner at East Side Therapy
PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS:
California Association of Marriage & Family Therapists
EMDR International Association
