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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.
I focus on forming a safe and productive relationship dynamic with you, so you feel inclined to allow all the parts of you to emerge and speak up. As a liberatory and anti-oppressive therapist, 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.
With extensive training in relational depth therapy, I take great care and responsibility for how you and I will mutually influence each other in our work. As a result, I aim to offer interpretations from what emerges in our session 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 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 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