Approach

Beginning psychotherapy often coincides with a quiet recognition: something essential in how you’ve lived your life no longer works, and continuing on as before no longer feels possible. The way you understood yourself and moved through the world—perhaps successfully, for many years—begins to fall away, but nothing trustworthy has yet emerged to take its place.

If you’re at such an impasse, and feeling depressed, anxious, or overwhelmed, it’s not a personal failure but rather an essential part of being human – and it likely can’t be solved through willpower alone. As a Jungian-oriented psychotherapist, my practice is founded on the belief that experiences such as these are not simply problems to fix, but rather point the way toward a more grounded, authentic life. Our task will be to cultivate a space in which you can hear the true wisdom in your suffering, and, over time, to learn to embody its lessons. Clients find that, through this work, experiences and emotions that were previously unbearable become the bedrock for their most invaluable inner resources, as well as a source of vitality, meaning, and inner authority.

I hold an M.A. in Integral Counseling Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies and am completing post-graduate training in analytic depth psychology at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. My experience includes extended Zen practice; a decade as a community organizer; facilitating group therapy in a men’s prison; working with veterans and unhoused families; and serving as a certified restorative justice circle-keeper for families in the aftermath of sexual abuse. I work from a trauma-informed perspective and remain especially attuned to the ways culture, class, and race shape both suffering and transformation.