LMFT, 9 years of experience
I am a Marriage and Family Therapist Licensed in California. I have been working with children and families for over 25 years either as a therapist, developmental specialist or special education teacher. I use evidence-based treatment methods to address everyday milestones and developments that are hindered by anxiety, depression, life changes, trauma, habits etc. I am passionate about working with you to achieve your goals. While I often work with individuals age 4 and older, I also work with parents and families. I love helping parents navigate their own parenting path as well as their children's development, mental health, and behaviors. I enjoy providing culturally sensitive services to diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds including but limited to, people of color, women, LGBTQI+ individuals.
Our first session will first and foremost be about getting comfortable and feeling safe. Second, we will discuss psychosocial history, strengths, present challenges, goals, etc.
My first career, I was an early childhood special education teacher in the classroom and a developmental specialist in a family's home. It was within this job that I realized I wanted to support individuals and families in another capacity - their mental health and relationships. I am empathic, patient and I genuinely enjoy supporting people on their journey to living a life they value. My own personal experiences including, but not limited to anxiety, ADHD, and parenting have helped me resonate with so many things that come up in my office.
I love working on techniques to confront anxiety and fears, improve moods, conquer habits and addictions, and improve/repair relationships and communication. I will often work with clients with OCD, generalized anxiety, social anxiety, ADHD, Autism, perfectionism, people pleasing tendencies, depression, and trauma. While I genuinely enjoy listening and providing empathy, I also love to be active in session and working together to establish and meet your goals. I will encourage work in between sessions, that moves you towards your desired outcomes faster.
Using ACT, we can increase psychological flexibility, make room for all thoughts and feelings that arise in the moments and practice being present, opening up and doing what matters. We use acceptance and commitment to live a life we value by shifting the way in which we deal with personal experience.
With this approach we look at how our thoughts impact our feelings which in turn impact our behaviors. I am trained in SPACE, a program to support parents with children who have anxiety and/or OCD. I am also trained in I-CBT, in which we look at how obsessional doubts lead to compulsions, learn the reasoning process that makes obsessional doubts seem valid, highlight the differences between reasonable and obsessional doubts and learn how to use reasoning differently in regular life versus OCD life.