In our first session together, here's what you can expect

You don't need to arrive with it figured out. Most people come to their first session carrying something they've been holding alone for a long time, and part of what we do in that first hour is just let it have some air. We'll start by slowing down. I'll ask you what's bringing you in, and I'll actually listen to the whole answer, not just the clinical headlines. I want to know what's been hard, how long it's been hard, and what you've already tried. I want to know what your days look like, what your body feels like, what keeps you up at night. I want to know what you're hoping for, even if that hope feels fragile or hard to articulate. I'll ask about your history, not to reduce you to it, but because the things that shaped you are often still speaking. That's especially true in the perinatal period, when becoming a mother has a way of bringing everything you thought you'd processed back to the surface. Birth can do that. Postpartum can do that. The particular weight of raising children right now, in this moment in history, can do that too. By the end of our first session, my goal is for you to feel two things: understood, and less alone. Not fixed. Not assessed. Not handed a treatment plan before I've even learned your name. Just genuinely met. I'll also be honest with you about what I'm noticing and where I think we might go together. If I think a particular approach would serve you well, I'll say so and explain why. If I think there's something we should explore before we commit to a direction, I'll say that too. I don't believe in keeping clients in the dark about the therapeutic process. You deserve to understand what we're doing and why. A few things you can expect from me regardless of where we start: I will not pathologize your distress. If you are anxious about postpartum changes, I will not treat that anxiety as the problem to be eliminated. If you are grieving the birth you didn't have, I will not rush you toward acceptance. If you are scared about climate change and what it means for your child's future, I will not suggest that the fear is irrational or that positive thinking is the answer. Your responses to real things are not disorders. My job is to help you understand them, metabolize them, and find a way to live inside them with more steadiness and less suffering. I work somatically, which means I pay attention to the body as much as the mind. You may not be used to a therapist asking where you feel something in your body, or inviting you to slow down and notice what's happening physically in a moment of distress. That's okay. We go at your pace. But I've found that for the kinds of things mothers carry, the body often holds the story more honestly than the words do. I also draw on expressive arts when it fits. That doesn't mean art therapy in the way you might be picturing it. It means that sometimes a drawing, a piece of writing, or an image can open a door that direct conversation hasn't been able to reach. It's always an invitation, never a requirement. My framework is feminist and multicultural, which means I take seriously the social and political conditions that shape your experience. Maternal distress doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens inside systems, inside histories, inside bodies that have been told certain things about what they should want and how they should feel. I hold all of that as context, not as a soapbox, but as a lens that keeps me from blaming you for things that were never yours to carry alone. By the end of our first session, we'll have a beginning. Not an answer, but a direction. A sense of what the work might look like, what you're hoping to move toward, and whether the fit between us feels right. That last part matters to me. I want you to leave feeling like this is a space where you can tell the truth, even the parts of it you haven't said out loud yet. If it feels right, we'll schedule our next session and go from there. If you need time to think, that's okay too. There's no pressure to commit before you're ready. What I can promise is that I'll bring my full attention, my genuine curiosity, and 14 years of clinical and research experience to every session we have together. I became a therapist because I believe that being truly witnessed by another person is one of the most healing things that can happen to us. I still believe that. It's why I do this work.

The biggest strengths that I bring into our sessions

I've spent 14 years in clinical practice and an equal number of years in research, and the two have never been separate for me. What I know from the literature shapes how I sit with a client. What I learn from clients shapes what questions I bring back to the research. That integration is probably my greatest strength: I don't practice from a script, and I don't research from a distance. My clinical work is grounded in somatic and trauma-informed approaches, expressive arts, and nature-based interventions, held within a feminist, multicultural framework. I have a particular gift for sitting with complexity without rushing toward resolution. Mothers often come to me carrying things that don't fit neatly into a diagnosis, experiences that are real and serious but that haven't been named well by the field. I'm comfortable in that territory. In some cases, I've done the work of naming it myself. I hold a PhD in Multicultural Women's and Gender Studies and have built my career at the intersection of maternal mental health, ecological identity, and climate psychology. I coined the term maternal ecodistress and am the author of a forthcoming book on what it means to mother during ecological crisis. That scholarly grounding means I bring genuine intellectual depth to the emotional work we do together. I'm not just a practitioner who has read some things. I'm someone who has spent years thinking carefully about what mothers are living through and why it's so hard to get adequate support for it. I'm also honest. I'll tell you what I notice. I'll name patterns I see. I won't let you stay comfortable in something that's keeping you stuck, and I'll do that with care rather than confrontation. Clients often tell me they feel both challenged and deeply safe in our work together. That combination is something I've cultivated deliberately, because I think it's where real change happens.

The clients I'm best positioned to serve

I work best with mothers and birthing people who are carrying something they haven't been able to fully name yet. Often they're intelligent, self-aware women who have tried to think their way through their distress and found that it hasn't been enough. They know something is shifting, and they're ready to look at it more closely with support. My clients are often navigating postpartum anxiety or depression, processing a birth that didn't go the way they hoped, or working through the particular grief that comes with raising children in a time of ecological crisis. Sometimes all three at once. They tend to be thoughtful, searching people who want a therapist who will take their full experience seriously and meet them where they are. I'm also well suited to mothers who feel the weight of the world in a literal sense — who lie awake worrying about climate change, who feel complicated about bringing children into an uncertain future, who find that their love for their child has cracked them open to a grief they didn't expect. This experience is more common than it appears, and I've spent years building the clinical and research framework to meet it. You don't need to have it figured out to work with me. You just need to be willing to tell the truth about what you're carrying.