About Me:

I am a queer white woman, raised in Oakland. Before becoming a therapist, I spent nearly two decades working in nonprofits focused on immigrant rights, environmental advocacy, and racial justice. I completed a Masters in Counseling Psychology with the California Institute of Integral Studies and a clinical practicum with Church Street Integral Counseling Center. I currently practice with Blue Oak Therapy Center. I draw on meditative, artistic, nature-based, and dreamwork practices in my own well-being.

Approach:

My work integrates depth psychology, liberation psychology, trauma studies, and spiritual/transpersonal approaches to human wholeness and belonging. This means that I hold respect and curiosity for your unconscious processes, your political context, the life events that shaped you and your lineage, and the spiritual or soul dimension of your experience. 

I have experience supporting clients and community in:

• Bringing compassion, insight, and care to the after-effects of childhood abuse, neglect, and sexual trauma

• Identifying and exiting harmful relationships

• Honoring and holding space for intergenerational trauma

• Locating ourselves within systems of oppression and taking liberatory action

• Navigating and confronting racism and xenophobia

• Exploring and embracing LGBTQ+ identity – questioning, coming out, building chosen family, exploring authentic selfhood, processing and externalizing harassment and discrimination

• Nurturing an authentically gendered self, including gender-expansiveness, gender transition, gender euphoria, and gender transcendence

• Understanding how social class shapes us – particularly for people with working class lineages who are struggling to navigate survivor’s guilt, class rage, and erasure in educational and professional spaces

• Holding tenderness and curiosity around dissociation and dissociative coping strategies

• Supporting and navigating grief and mourning

• Understanding, tending, and metabolizing shame

• Navigating life transitions, both chosen (e.g. voluntary moves, career changes, spiritual calling, parenthood) and not (e.g. illness, accident, sudden loss, violence, displacement)

Why Therapy?

Systemic harm, interpersonal violence, loss, and overwhelming experiences can shape our maps of the world and distort our images of ourselves. This can interrupt our ability to give and receive love, and to discern our path forward. These forces are powerful, but they are not the deepest truth.

When humans are safe enough, love and wisdom guide our lives. It is my calling to accompany others in remembering this, or in feeling it for the first time.