My work creatively weaves together the following practices and approaches that facilitate human healing and growth:

Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS)

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a therapeutic modality developed by Richard Schwartz, PhD. IFS views your mind as an ecosystem made up of the interactions and relationships between various inner “parts” of your personality. These parts each have their own unique perspectives, feelings, motivations, and roles.

Parts also carry your most treasured and longed-for gifts, which were long ago exiled for safe-keeping. These exiled parts have never given up hope that, one day, you will heal, retrieve, and restore them to their valuable place in your daily life.

A basic assumption of IFS is that “all parts are welcome,” and all parts, in their own creative - and often obsolete and counter-productive - way, are doing their best to help you to survive and thrive. IFS considers that the essence of each person (which IFS calls Self) is a presence that is creative, loving, and wise.

For more information about IFS, click here.

Circling

For me, Circling is best described as a relational meditation practice, which supports you to stay connected to yourself while deepening your authenticity and intimacy in relationships with others. The practice of Circling teaches you to notice your inner experience (your perceptions, body sensations, emotions), to communicate (reveal) that to others - with the intention to relate - and to listen for the other person’s true humanity.

Your emotions and strivings, as well as the ways you get derailed and stuck, are aspects of your humanity that are non-judgmentally witnessed, held and transformed through the practice. The result is a surprising and enlivening experience of being deeply known and discovering your own unique way of belonging to the human family.

Attachment Repair

“Attachment” refers to the bonding relationship between infant and caregiver. Some early experiences of parental neglect, abandonment, or mis-attunement can lead to “attachment wounding”. The strategies you devised to protect yourself from the original pain of attachment wounding can lead to problems in your current relationships, such as, avoidance of intimacy or commitment, angry acting out, desperate clinging (often to a person who isn’t able to be intimately connected), hiding behind a “false self” in order to attract or hold onto a relationship, or the inability to leave harmful situations. Attachment-oriented psychotherapy can provide you with a new experience that helps you to heal the original pain and transform beliefs and behaviors that get in the way of the love, connection, and intimacy you really want.

Mindfulness of the Present Moment

My years of practice have taught me that the highest potential for healing and transformation comes from working experientially, with mindfulness of the present moment. This means that, rather than telling me your analysis, opinions, or thoughts about your experience, I invite you to explore what’s happening right now, with as much curiosity and non-judgmental welcoming as possible. Paying attention in this way has many therapeutic benefits. When you are able to let go of the habit of ignoring, judging, or dismissing your experience, your growth and learning can move much more quickly. Being curious enables you to know yourself in a deeper and more complex way - and thereby expand your self-love. Mindfulness helps to increase awareness of what is actually occurring and how your experience is constantly moving and changing. It also helps you to shift your sense of who you are - from being your thoughts, emotions, etc. to having your thoughts, emotions, etc. With this shift of perspective you are empowered to relate to your experience with more compassion, curiosity, and courage. You discover that your present moment experience is an “inarguable truth” that, when you are able to listen to it, provides great wisdom and guidance for your life.

Ecopsychology and Nature Connection

I understand human beings as essentially inseparable from the vast self-organizing living system that is our planetary home. The earth is alive, intelligent, diverse, creative, and oriented towards health, growth, and fulfilling its potential. I believe that many human problems derive from our disconnection from our earthly, organic, animal nature. Much of my therapeutic work aims to repair this disconnection and the imbalances that have ensued.

To learn more about how I work with eco-anxiety, click here.

Somatic Awareness

My experience has led me to trust the natural intelligence of the body as a reliable source for answers to our deepest, most soulful and existential questions about how to solve our problems and find our place and purpose in this world, this life. Following the trail of sensation, gesture and imagination can open doors to the vast unknown resources which lie within each of us. The body can also guide us through the healing that is needed so we can grow and blossom, bear fruit, and become seed again, like healthy plants.

Deep Imagination

You may receive inspiration, guidance and support through the window of your imagination. Imagery, symbols, or metaphors that can come to you through dreams or life events or sudden epiphanies can be powerful flashes of insight or meaning that shed light on the deep themes that are unfolding in your life. Together, we listen and watch for these underground currents that may emerge unnoticed if we are not paying close attention. Through engaging your deep imagination, you bypass the linear, logical, problem-solving left brain, and gain access to your right brain, where you will find creativity, inspiration, and everything you don’t already know. With the help of this resource, your healing and growth can proceed in surprising and powerful ways.

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy

Often referred to as a "body-oriented talking therapy," Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is a unique method that blends theory and technique from cognitive, affective, and psychodynamic therapy with straightforward somatic interventions, such as helping you to become aware of your body, to track your bodily sensations, and to implement physical actions that promote empowerment and competency.

Trauma Resolution

An event is considered “traumatic” when it overwhelms your normal, everyday coping resources. Recent advances in the treatment of trauma emphasize that the “legacy” of the trauma - how the past lives on in the present - is more important than the traumatic event itself. This means that in trauma treatment, it is not always necessary nor even advisable to spend a lot of time re-visiting the painful details of the past. What is more important is discovering how you adapted and survived your past experience, and working through the way those ingenious adaptations may be problematic now, in your present life.

Anger Management

For over 10 years I developed curriculum and taught Anger Management classes at Kaiser Oakland. Changing angry behaviors requires a journey of self discovery. The emotion of anger carries necessary information and energy. It tells you when an important need is not being met, or an injustice or violation is occurring.

Sometimes, your angry feelings can be exaggerated, which is most likely related to trauma or attachment injuries from the past that are triggered in the present situation. Angry behavior, which seeks to protect you by stopping a perceived threat, can be constructive or destructive. Most angry behaviors create more problems than they solve.

In addition to stopping harmful behaviors, effective Anger Management involves:

• increasing awareness of the unmet needs, tender feelings, painful memories, and diminished self-concept that lie beneath an angry outburst

• taking responsibility for your own feelings, needs, and behaviors (this means stop blaming other people for your experience)

• learning to soothe yourself and calm down before speaking or acting

• communicating assertively - expressing your feelings and needs, asking for what you want, saying no to what you don't want - in a way that respects yourself and the other person.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

CBT focuses on the role that thinking plays in both the maintenance and the disruption of unhealthy patterns of relating to self and other, and engaging in life. Seeing the dynamic, co-creative relationship between thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and body sensations can be very empowering - in terms of knowing that who you are is bigger than the patterns you observe, and in terms of being able to disrupt those patterns. You have to know what you are doing before you can stop doing it.

Life Skills

Therapy can include developing some necessary life skills that you never learned.  For example, you may have never learned affect regulation (how to calm down when you are upset).  Or, maybe you never learned authentic communication (how to express your feelings and needs, how to ask for what you want and how to say no to what you don't want). Or perhaps you never learned emotional intelligence (how to listen and respond to the messages carried by the various emotions - grief, anger, fear, shame, jealousy, etc.).

Spirituality

What inspires awe and wonder in your life? What opens up a point of view, a way of being, an experience that is bigger than your current sense of yourself? Actively developing a relationship with your spirituality can bring confidence, wisdom, and guidance to your unfolding life.

“But every man is more that just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again.”

- Hermann Hesse

Training, Experience and Credentials

Professional Training:

• Aletheia Coach Training, Levels 1 & 2 and Unfolding Deeply Expanded States

• Somatic Internal Family Systems Training

• Accelerated Track Psilocybin Assisted Psychotherapy Training for Oregon Residents, Integrative Psychiatry Institute

• Psychedelic Assisted Psychotherapy Training, Integrative Psychiatry Institute

• Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy Training, Modules 1-5, polaris-insight center

• Aromatic Shamanism Mentorship, Aromagnosis

• The Source of Embodied Ethics, The Institute of Erotic Intelligence

• Internal Family Systems Therapy - Level 1 Training

• The Art of Circling - Level 1 Practitioner Training and Level 2 Facilitator Training, The Circling Institute

• Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Level II: Training in Emotional Processing, Meaning Making, and Attachment Repair

• Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Level I: Training in Affect Dysregulation, Survival Defenses, and Traumatic Memory

• Foundation Training in Ericksonian Hypnosis

• Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT) for Couples

• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) training with Christine Padesky

• Two-year post-graduate internship in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy at The Psychotherapy Institute, Berkeley, California

Professional Experience:

• 28 years private practice

• 10 years teaching and developing curriculum for skills-based psycho-educational classes - Anger Management, Overcoming Depression, and Communicating Assertively - at Kaiser, Oakland

• 10 years providing individual and group supervision and teaching clinical seminars for psychotherapy interns at Holos Institute, San Francisco, California

Personal Experience:

• Meditation - since 1997, numerous Vipassana retreats (Spirit Rock) and Somatic Meditation (Dharma Ocean)

• Nature Connection: Permaculture Design Certificate at Regenerative Design Institute; Immersions in the mysteries of nature and psyche with Animas Valley Institute and The School of Lost Borders; The Art of Mentoring with 8 Shields Institute and Jon Young

Credentials:

• 2023 - Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist - Oregon License #T2279

• 2001 - Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist - California License #MFC37654

• 1996 - MA in Social/Clinical Psychology, New College of California

• 1983 - BA in Practice of Art/Painting Emphasis, UC Berkeley