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Areas of Focus:

  • Stress, Anxiety and Depression

  • Assertiveness and Communication

  • Changing Careers/Relationships

  • Cultural Identity Formation

  • Adult Children of Immigrant Parents

  • Childhood, Adult and Intergenerational Trauma

  • Structural, Institutional and Assimilation Trauma

Sessions are meant to follow where you are in the 'here and now' rather than following a prescribed format. I believe what you need is already inside of you and our work will find a way to help that emerge. Sometimes current events or new ideas can awaken and link to things already inside of us. Sometimes doing less and striving less allows us the room to reckon with the things inside of us that have been waiting to be seen for a long time.

I work from a contemporary psychoanalytic perspective, informed by attachment, trauma, critical race, decolonial, feminist, queer, gender and social justice theories. This means that my clinical base is psychoanalytic because of its vocabulary and frameworks that help address how we are psychically formed in relationship to other people and other phenomena and for its methodology of deep listening. But like all theories and disciplines it requires continuous evolution and reworking for ways it will inevitably fall short of being inclusive to all, thus I am a constant student in other disciplines where psychoanalytic theory has yet to develop. Additionally, I implement skills based work and mindfulness practices when needed.

As a Korean-American, cisgender passing, able-bodied woman, I intend to offer an affirming perspective about your social and cultural identity, whether different or similar to my own.

I welcome people of diverse backgrounds. You may be a BIPOC (Black/Indigenous/Person of Color), LGBTQ+ person, 1st- or 2nd-generation immigrant and/or feeling marginalized in your community. I welcome your questions about how I may understand and center your personal identity and life circumstances.

I bring a prior professional background as an architect and studies in art, yoga and meditation as a complement to my psychotherapy practice. My recent clinical experience includes long-term depth work with creatives, career professionals and adult children of immigrant parents. My prior clinical experience was in community mental health working with young children with complex trauma, adults with severe mental illness and teaching adult DBT (dialectical behavior therapy) skills.

Credentials

  • Analytic Candidate, Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC), 2021 -present

  • Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, California (LMFT#105935)

  • The Psychotherapy Institute, Berkeley, CA (2-year intensive psychodynamic training certificate), 2018

  • The Wright Institute, M.A. 2015

  • M.I.T., M.Arch 2001

  • Columbia University, B.A. 1995

 

Affiliations:

  • BIPOCanalysis collective

  • ​Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility, Section IX, Society of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (Division 39), of the American Psychological Association

  • The Psychotherapy Institute, Board Member at Large (2018-2020)

  • The Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California

  • Northern California Society of Psychoanalytic Psychology 

  • California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists

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