About
Reaching out for support is the first step you can make to begin making changes and move on with your life.
I am so glad you are here. This section of my website is to help you get to know me. I am a Bay Area native with a few years living in Southern California. I experienced life as a young single mother and the challenges that provided me and now so proud of my grown son and love spending time with my two grandsons!
My style is warm, collaborative and relational. I strive to create a supportive environment using compassion and encouragement which allows your strengths to come alive. I want to help you achieve a better quality of life.
Becoming a therapist later in life has allowed me to gain experience of the ups and downs and acceptance of life's struggles.
My clients describe me as warm and approachable. My therapeutic approach is rooted in interpersonal process, emotion-focused intervention, and mindfulness. I often see clients who experience:
Anxiety and Depression
Life Transitions
Parenting Education
Couples Counseling
Grief & Trauma
Addiction & Co-dependency
Somatic and Mindfulness Therapies
I have additional training in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and IFS (Internal Family Systems). I like to use IFS because I believe it helps clients make sense of conflicting emotions. Clients agree they use it to help themselves when they are not in session. I use an eclectic approach to therapy, connect to each client and support them in the way that works best for them.
Earlier in my career I worked as a project manager in the corporate world. I went back to school later in life and earned my B.A. in Psychology from Sonoma State and later an M.S. in Counseling Psychology from Dominican University. I have worked in several agencies and over the years seeing adults & adolescents and now in private practice doing tele-therapy in California. During graduate school, I worked with the developmentally disabled and continue to have a special place in my heart for them. In my personal time I like to see friends and family, hike, take photographs and travel.
I believe we all have a life-positive, self-directing, self-healing energy and intelligence. Along the way, many of us have had experiences that have inhibited or created stuck places that have added to life stress. My goal is to create a space that facilitates the emergence of this natural impulse towards health and wholeness.