Licensed to practice in California and accepts 15 insurances. Specializes in Depression, Life Transitions, Trauma and PTSD
New to Grow
I am a wife of 4 decades, a mother of three adults, and a grandmother. Along with practicing psychotherapy, I have also spent numerous years as a client in psychotherapy. Using a psychodynamic framework, I incorporate cognitive concepts within a framework of self-compassion to assist clients in telling their story, recognizing their strengths, and identifying what they need to heal.
When clients schedule a session, I email them a questionnaire to complete and return prior to their session. Receiving and reading the completed questionnaire before we meet provides basic and required information. It also supplies background that prepares me to hear a person's story without having to interrupt them to ascertain the information asked and required of every client. It allows me to actively listen with greater depth and meaning so that the client can feel safe, heard, and valued.
Working with clients, facilitating them to develop a wider range of understanding and a deeper sense of engagement with self and others, helps me to understand human life with all its many crevices and layers superimposed, one upon the other. I count it a privilege to get to know people and hear their stories. I have learned much through this collaborative endeavor. It has cultivated within me a greater sense of compassion for humanity and myself.
It can be difficult to identify and engage one's authentic voice or "the sound of the genuine" that resides in us all. Serious thinkers, undergoing a wealth of feelings, rooted in past difficulties, the pain of which seems to linger, can benefit from the opportunity or challenge to engage themselves from a stance of self-compassion. We are not the childhood disappointments and difficulties undergone and survived. Realizing this enables a person to adapt and thrive.
I identify as
Psychodynamic
A psychodynamic approach allows me to gain a basic understanding of early circumstances and incidents that shape a person's ever-evolving view of self and others. Employing a psychodynamic framework helps me to see how the emotional table was set during a person's childhood so that they can decide how they want to change placements, flatware, and dinnerware in their current and future life.
Attachment-based
Attachment-based interventions allow me to help a person identify their attachment style, which enables them to recognize how they engage and interact with themselves and others.