Licensed to practice in New Jersey and accepts 13 insurances. Specializes in Anxiety, Depression, Life Transitions and 2 more.
New to Grow
I'm a licensed clinical social worker in New Jersey working with adults on anxiety, depression, PTSD, relationship challenges, and major life transitions. My clients include professionals under pressure, veterans, and men working through emotional disconnection. My approach is direct, warm, and collaborative. I draw on CBT, CPT, and narrative therapy, but I adapt to fit you, not the other way around.
The first session is mostly about getting oriented — to each other, and to what brought you in. I'll ask about what's going on now, what you've tried, what's working and what isn't, and what you're hoping therapy will actually do for you. I'll also ask some background questions about history, health, relationships, and anything else that helps me understand the context. There's no pressure to have it all figured out before you come in. Most people don't, and that's part of why they're reaching out. By the end of the session, I want you to leave with a clearer sense of what we'd be working on, how I'd approach it, and whether this feels like a fit. If it does, we'll talk about cadence and next steps. If it doesn't, I'll help you think about what might be a better match. Either way, you'll get something useful out of the hour.
I'm direct without being cold, and I'm comfortable with the parts of life people often feel they have to clean up before they bring them into a room. Clients tell me they appreciate that I take their context seriously — work, history, relationships, the systems they're navigating — rather than treating their distress as something separable from the life it's happening inside. I'm trained in evidence-based methods (CBT, CPT, trauma-focused approaches), and I use them with discipline, but I don't run sessions on autopilot or hand out worksheets in place of real conversation. My background outside of clinical practice — in public service, nonprofit leadership, and policy work on housing and behavioral health — means I've spent a long time thinking about how people get stuck and what actually helps them move. That shows up in the room as practicality. We'll figure out what's happening, why, and what to do about it. You should be able to feel the difference between sessions, not just inside them.
I work best with adults who arrive at therapy with a sense that something in their life — their work, their relationships, their internal experience, the shape of their days — is no longer tenable, and who are ready to look at it honestly rather than around it. Many of my clients are professionals carrying responsibilities that outpace the support available to them: people in helping fields, public service and law enforcement, nonprofit leadership, clinical work, and other roles where the cost of caring is structurally underestimated. Others come in navigating the aftermath of trauma, a difficult transition, a loss, or a slower-burning depression or anxiety that has finally asked to be addressed. I am especially well-suited to clients who think carefully about their own lives — who want a therapist who can engage with ideas, complexity, and context, and who will not flatten their experience into a symptom checklist. I work well with clients who hold their circumstances and their psychology in the same frame: who recognize that not all suffering is pathology, and that meaningful change often requires attending to both internal patterns and the conditions in which those patterns formed.Clients tend to do well with me when they are open to a collaborative, structured approach, willing to do work between sessions, and interested in therapy as something more than symptom management — though symptom relief is often where we begin. I am not the right fit for clients seeking purely supportive listening without active engagement, or for those looking for a therapist to validate avoidance.
Other specialties
I identify as
Cognitive Behavioral (CBT)
n my practice, CBT serves as a foundational orientation for clients presenting with depression, anxiety, and adjustment-related concerns. I work collaboratively with clients to identify the cognitive patterns — automatic thoughts, core beliefs, and cognitive distortions — that maintain emotional distress and constrain behavioral flexibility. Sessions typically involve psychoeducation about the cognitive model, structured thought records, behavioral experiments, and graded exposure or activation as clinically indicated. I emphasize between-session practice and treat homework as collaborative inquiry rather than compliance, recognizing that the work clients do outside the room is where change consolidates. With clients whose presenting concerns intersect with structural stressors — housing instability, employment precarity, systemic inequity — I am careful not to pathologize reasonable responses to genuinely difficult circumstances, and I adapt the model to distinguish distorted cognition from accurate appraisals of adverse conditions.
Cognitive Processing (CPT)
I use CPT primarily with clients presenting with PTSD, particularly those whose trauma involves interpersonal violence, institutional betrayal, or events that have disrupted core beliefs about safety, trust, power, esteem, and intimacy. I follow the manualized protocol — typically twelve sessions, with the option of including or omitting the trauma account depending on clinical fit and client preference — while attending closely to pacing and stabilization. The work centers on identifying "stuck points," the assimilated or over-accommodated beliefs that keep clients tethered to the trauma, and using Socratic dialogue and structured worksheets (the ABC, Challenging Questions, Patterns of Problematic Thinking, and Challenging Beliefs worksheets) to help clients develop more accurate and balanced appraisals. I am explicit with clients that CPT is not about minimizing what happened or "thinking positively" — it is about recovering the capacity to hold complexity, including the reality of harm alongside the possibility of present and future safety.
Trauma-Focused CBT
While my current caseload is primarily adult, I draw on TF-CBT principles when working with younger clients or with adults whose trauma histories originated in childhood and remain organized around developmental themes. The PRACTICE components — psychoeducation and parenting skills, relaxation, affective expression and regulation, cognitive coping, trauma narrative and processing, in vivo mastery, conjoint sessions, and enhancing safety — provide a structured arc that I adapt to the developmental and relational context of each client. When caregivers or partners are appropriately involved, I work to strengthen the relational scaffolding around the client rather than positioning the therapist as the sole holding environment. I am attentive to the difference between trauma processing and re-exposure without containment, and I do not move into narrative work until affect regulation and safety planning are sufficiently established.
Mindfulness-Based Therapy
I integrate mindfulness throughout my work, drawing on both secular clinical traditions (MBSR, MBCT, the mindfulness modules within DBT and ACT) and the contemplative literatures from which they derive. With clients, this typically takes the form of brief in-session practices — breath awareness, body scans, urge surfing, defusion exercises — alongside psychoeducation about the function of attention and the difference between experiential avoidance and acceptance. I am cautious about presenting mindfulness as a generalized prescription; for clients with trauma histories, dissociative tendencies, or acute distress, undirected interoceptive practice can be destabilizing rather than grounding, and I modify accordingly. Philosophically, I treat mindfulness less as a technique for symptom reduction and more as a practice of relating differently to experience — an orientation that complements the cognitive and behavioral work without collapsing into it.
Narrative
Narrative therapy informs how I think about the relationship between clients and the stories they have inherited or been assigned about themselves. I draw on externalization, unique outcomes, re-authoring conversations, and the broader Whitean attention to dominant discourses and their effects. With clients whose identities have been shaped by structural marginalization — clients who have experienced homelessness, institutionalization, criminal-legal involvement, or sustained economic precarity — narrative practice offers a way to distinguish the person from the problem and to recover authorship of accounts that systems have written about them. I am careful not to romanticize re-authoring as a substitute for material change; the story matters, and so do the conditions in which it is being told. Narrative work in my practice tends to sit alongside more directive modalities rather than replacing them, and I find it especially useful in later phases of treatment when symptom stabilization has created room for meaning-making.