I am a Korean American, adult child of immigrants holding multiple intersectional identities. I grew up in an environment of extreme academic pressure and became a psychotherapist after I found myself enjoying the person to person dynamic of working with clients in my previous career as a professional architect and of course as a patient myself. This makes me uniquely suited to working with professionals whether changing careers or not, looking at things from multiple angles and having the stamina to see you through complex issues and high pressure situations. But most of all, I am interested in helping you know what you want for yourself if you struggle with meeting the expectations of others over yourself.

My own journey of healing from experiencing family, intergenerational, institutional, racial, gender and health trauma informs my work. As a result, your experiences of being marginalized, disempowered or degraded matter to me personally and professionally. Built into my therapeutic lens is always an inquiry into how various traumas and interlocking systems of oppression have impacted your life and have inevitably become internalized and affected you. 

I consider myself a liberatory and anti-oppressive therapist, because I support your awareness of how the sociopolitical, cultural and historical contexts you emerge from have affected you beyond your control. I stand firm in an anti-racist, anti-mysogynist, anti-homophobic, anti-ableist stance that holds space for folks holding multiple identities, languages and queer ways of living.

I take great care and responsibility for how power arises in the therapy relationship. While I recognize my authority and expertise is necessary in treatment, none of this is effective unless you feel empowered, open to collaboration or feel ok to question things or stop. As a result, I aim to offer interpretations from what emerges in our sessions only if they are useful to you at that time, not as an ultimate authority and not to take away from your process of understanding yourself. Moreover, I always invite you to feel free to clarify otherwise or disagree. 

As an avid learner holding a social justice lens, I am also informed by attachment, trauma, critical race, decolonial, Black feminist, queer, and gender theories. This means that my clinical base is psychoanalytic because of its methodology of deep listening and its frameworks that help to understand how we are psychically formed in relationship to other people and phenomena. But like all theories and disciplines it requires continuous evolution and critique 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 write about. 

I am an advanced (post-seminar) candidate in psychoanalysis at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. Psychoanalytic training is a post-licensure course of advanced study in theory and supervised case work with experienced analysts that takes place over a period of several years. 

I have presented, co-taught and organized classes on psychoanalytic issues around race, arts and culture, decolonization and abolition at Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, Access Institute and The Psychotherapy Institute.