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About
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About
I see adults of all ages, creatives and professionals working in high pressure environments, parents raising kids sometimes while caring for their parents, and am especially experienced with people seeking a culturally inclusive and anti-oppression informed treatment.
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Sessions are meant to meet you where you are in the 'here and now' rather than following a prescribed format. Sometimes current events or new ideas can awaken and link to things already inside of us. Often 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.
Approach and Background
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 to enhance our thinking together, 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.
IPA Advanced Analytic Candidate, Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, 2021 - present
The Psychotherapy Institute, Berkeley, CA (2-year psychodynamic training certificate),
The Wright Institute, M.A.
M.I.T., M.Arch
Columbia University, B.A.
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, California (LMFT#105935)
Licensed Professional Counselor, Oregon (#T3348)
Affiliations:
Community Psychoanalysis Track (CPT), The Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, Teaching and Education Committee
BIPOCanalysis collective
Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility, Section IX, Society of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (Division 39), of the American Psychological Association, Board Member
The Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, Candidate, Focus On Committee Member
The Psychotherapy Institute (TPI), Board Member at Large (2018-2020)
Northern California Society of Psychoanalytic Psychology (NCSPP)
California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists
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.
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 your 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.
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.