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Welcome, I'm Deborah. I help people create a deeper and more meaningful relationship to how they are living.
If you're here, you might be feeling distress or unrest about your relationships with family or friends, difficulty waking up and going to work, or feeling saddled with grief or overwhelm from recent life changes or losses. Whatever you might be struggling with, your story is important to me and I am here to help.
Reaching out for therapeutic help is a sign of strength and self-respect. Understanding yourself deeply is not only healing but also an investment in developing your true and agentic self.
Together we will help you heal and make space for deep reflection to develop your insight and wisdom. 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 making life choices.
If you're feeling like you might have lost your creative spark or sense that a deeper meaning to your life might be missing, you are onto something.
A lot of us forgot how to play, dream and try new things as we grew into adults and work and family responsibilities took over our time. Many people I see re-find their spark as our sessions combine insight work with new ways of paying attention to themselves through their dreams, words and sounds, physical sensations, interpersonal and social phenomena, and other ways of knowing.
If you're an immigrant, a child of immigrants or a person of color, your experiences of navigating two or more cultures, bearing microaggressions and invisibility deserve to be uniquely understood.
I bring my lived experience as an Asian American, dedicated study and teaching experience on racial injuries and over a decade of professional practice in working with people of color and other marginalized and oppressed people.
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My Approach
I work 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
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Services
You are feeling ready to start weekly therapy and dig deep into what is going on underneath the surface with another mind. You are a master at thinking but your feelings can be hard to parse at times. You've always wanted to know how to make use of your dreams and intuition. You are hoping therapy this time will be more stimulating with deeper reflections and link making to help you make the expert on understanding yourself.
You feel it is time to be in psychoanalysis, have some notions of lying down on the couch and are especially looking to work with a contemporary liberation and queer oriented BIPOC psychoanalyst. You need someone that will be responsive with warmth, humor and creativity and won't leave you hanging in rigid silence.
You've tried the workbooks, maybe EFT and Gottman, listened to Esther Perel, liked what you saw on that Couples series on Showtime with psychoanalyst Orna Guralnik and are looking for a therapist to provide a deeper point of view in what is going on between you two. You both have trauma and want a strong therapist that can steer the ship when the storms hit in session.
If you grew up with financial insecurity, it might be hard to give yourself permission to invest in therapy.
Many of the people I see began with doubts, but over time they noticed undeniable deep and enduring changes that resulted in improved mood, deepened perception, and quicker recovery from inevitable moments of upset or stressful life events.
You are ready to make the time and get started, but you've been hurt in your life and that makes it hard to trust others.
I work with many folks that have been hurt by significant people in their lives and respect your hesitation. I invite you to attend a few sessions to try it out, with no obligation to continue for the long term unless it feels right.
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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 with Covid safety in mind 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.
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