Trauma and Grief affect your relationships with yourself and others.

I help adults, adolescents and couples get unstuck from trauma and grief. I have been licensed as a psychologist for 20 years and this is my passion.

Experience you can trust

I am a Berkeley, California native who attended UC Santa Cruz for my undergraduate education in literature and legal studies. I then moved back to the SF Bay Area and got a certificate in Alcohol and Drug Abuse Studies, which I used later in my clinical training and work while completing my doctorate in Clinical Psychology at John F. Kennedy University.

The emphasis in graduate school was becoming multiculturally aware and competent. Since then, I have experience with people from diverse cultural and economic backgrounds. In addition, I've proudly served LGBTQ+ adult and adolescent clients throughout my career.

I worked in many different settings, including community mental health clinics, substance abuse treatment programs, and a juvenile detention facility in Santa Rosa. I was licensed in 2003 and went into private practice a year later. I am an EMDRIA-trained EMDR therapist since 2008 and have found it to be very helpful in resolving stuck emotions that arise from grief and trauma.

In 2009 I moved from the Bay Area down to Lancaster, CA. In my private practice, I've worked with children, adolescents, families, adults, and couples. Since the pandemic, I have been seeing clients by telehealth only and plan to continue doing so for the duration of my career.

Benefits of Telehealth

Video therapy is safer, more convenient, and more cost efficient for you. With telehealth, you don't have to pay for gas to get here. If you’re anywhere in California, I can see people you as long as you are not in acute crisis (suicidal or homicidal), or abusing substances severely. I also find that people like being in the comfort of their own homes when they receive hypnotherapy. 

How I Serve You 

In my private practice, I do this with

• EMDR therapy,
• Ericksonian clinical hypnosis,
• Flash Technique,
• Solution-Focused Brief Therapy,
• Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, and
• CBT.

My passion is helping individual and couple clients move past painful, difficult events in your lives so you can enjoy life and have a better relationship with yourselves and others.

Inclusive Couples and Relationship Therapy

If you are in a love or sexual relationship, your attachment to your early caregivers may be influencing your behavior and emotions in the relationship more than you realize. Factors like unresolved trauma, grief, previous problems in the current relationship, and stress in general can negatively impact your bonding with your mate. 

Being in a nontraditional or stigmatized relationship like a same-sex partnership or consensually non-monogamous bond can also isolate you and make you feel alone in your relationship struggles. I would love to help you figure out your relationship and learn how to dance differently with your partner, so you can reconnect with your partner and feel safe in the relationship. A secure bond with your partner can also help your sex life. 

 If you’re ready to remove trauma and grief as the barriers that hold you back from the life you want and deserve, please give me a call.