Counseling and psychotherapy that recognizes depth and complexity
You don’t have to figure it out alone
You are bright, capable, and successful in many areas of your life, and yet there are places where you are struggling.
You want to talk to someone who can help you analyze the details, while not losing sight of the big picture. You want to feel heard and understood, but also challenged. You want to work with someone who understands depth and complexity. Someone who can take multiple perspectives, recognize patterns over time, engage with ambiguity and unanswered questions, and help you connect to your core values. Counseling can be that space for you to develop deeper awareness of yourself, clearer intentions for your life, and the tools to move from insight to action.
Individual Counseling
One-on-one counseling is an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of yourself and your relationship to others. You can explore who you are and who you want to be.
My areas of expertise include:
Helping gifted adults and teens navigate life challenges utilizing their capacity for depth, complexity, ability to hold multiple perspectives, and work with metaphor and symbol. Together, we explore issues such as emotional intensity and heightened sensitivity, perfectionism, procrastination, struggles with social relationships, multipotentiality, managing expectations of others, existential loneliness, and low self-esteem.
Helping individuals who are seeking to understand their faith and religious traditions more deeply, or in a new way. This includes those who are seeking to develop and deepen their spiritual experience, as well as those who have experienced abuse in religious communities, those who are struggling to redefine their lives after leaving a religious community, and those who are questioning their former spiritual beliefs or no longer believe what they once did. My approach is open, non-judgmental, and centered on your experience. I don’t bring any sectarian position to the conversation; I help my clients create and hold a space for their own spiritual exploration.
Relationship Counseling
At its core, all of the work I do as a counselor and psychotherapist is rooted in relationships. The guiding framework for my work is systems theory, which always takes into account the relationship systems at play in every issue, whether working at an individual level, or with a couple or family. When a problem is more directly related to a particular relationship, I work with the relationship unit that makes the most sense for the situation. I am affirming of all identities and relationship configurations.
I also work with families, and I work with children only in the context of the family. While I don’t practice therapy with children individually, I have an extensive educational and professional background with children including as a preschool teacher and play therapist, and I frequently work with parents on issues related to child development and parenting challenges.
Career Counseling
Your career is likely to play a huge role in your sense of identity over the course of your lifetime. It can also be a source of stress, triggering deeper conflicts about meaning, purpose, and self-confidence. A common theme of high-ability individuals is the challenge of multipotentiality: the reality that there are many viable career paths that would be interesting and fulfilling, but to choose one path and develop skills at a high level often forecloses the ability to choose another. Figuring out how to respond to this dilemma in an affirming way is a vital step in career development. Here are some areas I explore with my clients:
I help high-achieving teens and young adults understand their personality traits, strengths, interests, and values, and how these various components come together in finding meaningful life work.
I help adults considering career changes find clarity as they consider new directions in their career and life.
I help adults who have lost a sense of meaning and purpose in their chosen career, or who experience challenges of perfectionism and lack of confidence. My focus is on helping my clients construct a way forward that connects to their values and sense of self, either through their current job, or through developing other avenues in their lives that deepen their sense of meaning, purpose, and self-esteem.
Online Counseling
I offer online counseling for clients in California. I do not currently meet with clients in-person.
My virtual office is HIPAA compliant, and easy to access.
“The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.”
—Amelia Earhart