psychotherapy & contemporary psychoanalysis
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In-person in Berkeley, CA and Online for residents of CA and OR
Do you walk in the world feeling so much that it’s exhausting? Maybe most people think you’re ok because you keep showing up and often do a good a job at it. But if you’ve found your way here, it’s likely that you know you can’t keep going on like this and something is going to break.
Maybe you feel fed up with a friend, a coworker, a family member or partner that keeps upsetting you even though they might not know. It’s been challenging to communicate and be fully understood by them. It might even be risky to say what you really want to them because you worry they will take it the wrong way and it will make things worse.
Are you waking up and dreading the day because you are living a life that doesn’t reflect what you really want in your life? It might feel hard to make the cut whether it’s a relationship, a job or particular circumstance that will affect many people. It’s scary to make such radical changes even though your life would be the better for it.
Whatever you might be struggling with, your story is important to me and I am here to help.
Welcome, I'm Deborah.
I help people grapple with hard things towards deep and enduring transformation. It takes time, but with steady commitment, change is possible. If you’re tenacious like I am, we will get there. It’s rare that we are born into an ideal environment and received all the things we needed to develop and be in a world that is constantly full of difficult events and encounters with others.
If you’re a person of color or hold marginalized or oppressed identities, it’s even that much harder to survive and keep on going. As a Korean American, adult child of immigrants, holding my own intersectional identities, I bring my lived experience and over a decade of professional experience and teaching on issues of oppression.
What to Expect
In the therapeutic space together, you will begin the journey of healing and become clear on what you really want and need by learning to listen deeply to yourself. As you become the expert on yourself, you will feel less ambivalent and hesitant, and more certain and at ease in asserting your needs and life choices, especially around those that used to make you doubt yourself
In our sessions, we will unpack all that you feel and think and also pay attention to what might be showing up in your dreams, your bodily sensations, and whatever you find yourself fixated on in the moment. Rather than following a prescribed format, sessions are meant to meet you where you are in the 'here and now'. Sometimes current events or new ideas can awaken and link to things already inside of us. Often ‘doing’ less and striving less allows you the room to reckon with the things inside of you that have been waiting to be seen for a long time.
My Approach
I work foundationally in a contemporary psychoanalytic modality, which means I train in the art of deep listening with a socially and culturally conscious lens of anti-oppression. I believe we are not just impacted by our early life caregivers but also by the impact on our identities of the social world (cultural, material and political.) And as a result, there is a lot we don’t know that is unconscious for better or worse.
I think of the unconscious like a rich wilderness that we can only hope to be in contact with when we are feeling as relaxed as possible and aren’t looking at it straight on. It’s like putting our ears to the earth that is you and naming what we sense and observe, finding clues and signs that can help us heal and make sense of what has been unresolved in you.
For this reason when possible, I encourage free association rather than coming prepared to session, and we may talk about dreams, random associations that come up in session or between sessions, or even notice something that was related to an event weeks prior.
"You can't find your own voice if you aren't listening for it."
-Ursula K. Le Guin
Getting Started
Call or email me to set up a free phone or video consultation (allow 15-25 minutes), in which I will ask you some questions to learn what is motivating you to seek help, and you can ask me any questions too. Please let me know several times you are available in the next two weeks and if you prefer we meet by zoom or phone for our free initial consultation.
I work in person at my office in Berkeley, and online with residents of California and Oregon. Together we will decide if it makes sense to move forward and meet in person or remotely via a secure telehealth video platform.
My office is located on College Ave. (near Alcatraz Ave.) in Berkeley with easy street parking, free public parking at Safeway and Rockridge BART station a 12-minute walk away.
Want to know more?
You don't have to be a wordsmith to express yourself in therapy even thought it's referred to as 'talk therapy' by many. You don't even have to be well versed in naming you feelings.
Most of us were never taught how to identify how we really feel. Expression is not always in the form of speech and your associations in a variety of forms are encouraged. As a creative with a former professional background as an architect, I often use humor, metaphors and imagery to aid in our exchanges and encourage you to bring in your dreams to analyze.
If English is not your primary language, I might encourage you to speak in your primary tongue as sometimes that might help you access or locate where you are at more accurately. If you are an expert at a craft or skill, I might also encourage metaphors relevant to those disciplines which you are often embodied in.
Sometimes we can't locate a feeling but might have a bodily sensation. Other times, we might notice a melody or piece of music pops up. For some, a particular image, memory, or scent may arise. None of these occurrences are insignificant. Sometimes we can link them to things in the moment, other times we may refer back to them later.
Psychoanalytic therapy is relational. The therapeutic relationship is a meta part of the process of healing and transformation.
Despite the best efforts at caring for yourself and being cared for by others, somewhere along the way the depths of what you needed to discover your full capacities and potential may have become lost to you. When this condition becomes prolonged, you might not realize you have been colluding with not truly being understood by yourself and others for a long time.
Being understood, deeply listened to and cared for by a therapist offers a healing experience from the ways your own experiences of being cared for was not enough, not safe or not in your best interest. A safe therapeutic relationship will help you feel inclined to test out new ways of asserting yourself, speak your mind freely and disagree or feel negatively towards your therapist at times without having to worry about negative consequences. In fact, you might be surprised how you will be celebrated or encouraged in stepping out towards you therapist in these ways.
For those that have grown up having to be independent from too young an age, change might look like freeing yourself from taking on more work than necessary or feeling secure about accepting help from others. If you've had to accommodate a controlling parental figure, change might look like learning how to disagree or turn down what someone wants in favor what you want without feeling guilty or worried about your safety.
Understanding and listening to what you want is hard because you were likely disenfranchised of this right due to circumstances beyond your control.
If you hold any marginalized identities via class, ability, race, sex and gender, you may have a tendency to hide or make yourself invisible for protection. If you grew up in stressful or abusive environments, you may have developed a hard shell to protect yourself that often results in feeling alienated and dispossessed of your voice. Both of these realities also hamper feeling fully connected to your full potential and capacities.
Sometimes we might not have had overtly harmful environments growing up but harm happened in the prior generation of your family. Intergenerational trauma can pass down silently in families until it is made visible and reckoned with. If you've ever felt that 'don't make trouble', 'don't rock the boat' or 'just lay low' were just family expressions, it's likely they were responses to historical oppression.
Learning how the environments around you failed to support you can help you let go of blaming yourself for what was never yours to take on.
A lot of people come to therapy because they have lost sight of what they want for themselves after living up to the expectations and standards of success set by their families and institutions.
This is why we spend time in therapy slowing down to explore the beliefs and desires that are emergent from you and challenge the ones that you have been carrying on behalf of others.
You may be finding yourself becoming tearful without understanding why or waking up one day and you just can't get out of bed. You might be reacting in dismissive, resentful, or angry ways that may be out of proportion to reality and later regretting how you responded.
Slowing down to explore your feelings in therapy can be challenging at times. But feelings need to be paid attention to as they have so much to communicate about what is going on. Spending time with your feelings clarifies how you want to move forward and ensures that your next steps will be in your best interset.
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