I am an interactive, pragmatic therapist who is passionate about learning from my clients’ expertise. I maintain that curiosity, open-mindedness, and compassion throughout my relationship with the people I work with. I am also a creative therapist who regularly employs varying methods to help clients learn skills that will enable them to begin living the life they most want to live. I primarily draw from principles from Contextual Behavioral Therapies–evidence-based therapies that have gained increasing attention in recent years due to their proven effectiveness in a large array of studies and randomized control trials.
No matter how old we are, we have likely been told in a multitude of ways to avoid our most difficult and unwelcome emotions. It starts in infant-hood, when our parents and caretakers would shake a set of keys in front of us in the hopes that we would stop crying. Pop culture, television and the world at large have passed on similar messages—that our most unwanted and painful emotions should be avoided, fought, tampered down, or minimized at all costs. We now understand due to the large amount of research on the topic, that the harder a person tries to control how they feel, the more miserable they are likely to become, especially in the long run.
My aim is to help clients develop skills in order to respond more effectively to their most challenging and often times unwanted emotions, thoughts and bodily sensations. In doing so, they are better able to treat themselves and others the way they genuinely want, and act more like the person they want to be. I am dedicated to working with a diverse range of people, within any age, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, socio-economic status, religion and culture. My goal is to help people create lives full of vitality that are guided by what is most important to them.
