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. Therapy 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 Psychotherapy
One-on-one counseling is an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of yourself and your relationship with 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.
Utilizing creative and symbolic avenues of discovery to connect non-traditional resources such as dreamwork, tarot, personal archetypes, meditative inquiry, and creative writing with more traditional frameworks for change and growth. (If you’d like to know more, feel free to inquire. I default to traditional therapeutic methods as a foundation for all clients unless you express interest.)
Relationship Counseling
At its core, all of the work I do as a 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.
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. I also have adult children of my own, and bring experiential knowledge to the parenting element of the family lifecycle.
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:
Your personality traits, strengths, interests, and values, and how these various components come together in finding meaningful life work.
Possibilities for new directions in your career and life.
Finding meaning and purpose in your chosen career.
Challenges of “imposter syndrome.”
Developing or reconnecting to other areas of your life—possibly overshadowed by your career—that deepen your sense of meaning, purpose, and self-esteem.
Online Counseling & Psychotherapy
I’m available online for clients in California.
I occasionally meet with clients for walk-and-talk therapy in San Diego
North County (Carlsbad or Oceanside) if appropriate to the situation.
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