Specialties

I work with a range of populations and concerns, but my areas of focus are: 

Members of the LGBTQ+ community: 

As a bisexual cisgender woman, I always enjoy working with members of the LGBTQ+ community, and strive to be an ally for everyone under the LGBTQ+ umbrella, including queer, asexual, trans*, non binary, and gender nonconforming clients. I also love working with members of the kink and poly or ENM communities as well. I practice in a way that focuses on your strengths and resilience. Both celebrating these identities and acknowledging the societal and cultural challenges that can follow them. 

People in STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) fields: 

I was raised in a STEM-focused family, full of scientists and engineers. I also studied in a STEM field, including receiving my BA in Organismal Biology from Scripps College in 2009, and completing multiple research projects throughout college as part of the Bronner lab at the California Institute of Technology. Through these experiences I have come to understand the unique cultures of both academic and industry STEM fields. This led me to write my dissertation on the experiences of cisgender female programmers in the San Francisco Bay Area. Through experience and research, I have become attuned to the ways in which the cultures of STEM and technology companies, can interact with your other identities, and am experienced in helping people to navigate this complex issue. I also help those working in STEM use the strengths of their familiarity with a scientific approach: looking at the reasons for various beliefs and behaviors, exploring the data that we all gather and the stories we tell around that data (we are creatures of predictive modeling based on past experience), and running behavioral and thought experiments together to try new approaches. 

College or graduate students, and adults in high pressure jobs:

Much of my graduate training was in community clinics (the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Clinic in Berkeley) and in college counseling centers at Mills College, Stanford University, and the University of San Francisco. I have treated a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate students of both traditional and non-traditional ages. I love working with people at this inflection point in life, as we're questioning assumptions and norms, and finding who and how we want to be in the world. I often work with people studying in or working in high pressure fields, such as law, business, medicine, science, and technology. Often times the same drive towards excellence that propels us towards some of these demanding careers can also add pressure to perform, entwine with our identity or self worth, and perpetuate self criticism. I also love to work with people working in creative pursuits, such as art or music. I find that in both cases, part of the task in therapy is learning to be curious about, and work with, how your individual brain works best, rather than getting caught in how we're told it "should" work. 

Intergenerational and Childhood Trauma:

As the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, I understand the impact of intergenerational trauma first hand. Whether or not we know the specific stories of what our ancestors experienced, we can feel them in our reactions, emotions, and beliefs. Both intergenerational and childhood trauma involve implicit experiential learning about how to stay as safe as we can in painful circumstances. We build beliefs about ourselves, the world, and other people that guide how we see and experience life. Traumatic memories are stored in a part of our brain that is focused on surviving, and they don't distinguish past from present. Believe it or not, that's meant to help us survive - if we or our ancestors have experiences and attack from a tiger and we see a shadow of that threat, our nervous system doesn't want us to waste time wondering if it's a bunny or a tiger, or thinking the tiger was from long ago, it just wants action and safety. Part of our task is integrating those memories with the timestamp if we no longer live among "tigers," and updating our understanding and ways of responding if the "tigers" are still among us.