I am committed to helping you understand your own history, struggles, and relationships in new ways, so you can create a path to a more satisfying, meaningful life. Through our work together we can be curious about the past, observant in the present, and hopeful for the future. Our sessions may contain currents of deep emotion and longing, as well as quiet reflection, thoughts about the day-to-day, and humor. The challenges of chronic illness and bodily concerns may be central some days, but at times exploring other issues will become our focus. I will provide a warm, sensitive presence, and be a non-judgmental, intelligent listener and caring witness to whatever unfolds. Weekly therapy provides a dependable time to be present for yourself in a collaborative and healing relationship.

As a nurse, I am accustomed to attending to and caring for the immediacy of the body, and the practical demands of illness. I am knowledgeable about medical issues, and understand the remarkable uncertainty and unpredictability of chronic illness. I also recognize the flexibility, adaptability, organization, and tolerance of ambiguity that self-management requires. I have learned that my capacity to help patients with illness often rests on being deeply attentive to the complexity and multiple realities of different illness experiences. Sometimes bodily feelings and sensations can be really hard to put into words. And many people have never described these things to another person; often no one has ever asked. I believe you deserve to be asked.

As a therapist, my work draws from psychoanalysis and psychodynamic perspectives, health behavior change approaches (such as motivational interviewing), feminism, and queer theory. I work with the meanings of illness within a person’s own history, family and culture, and recognize that unconscious meanings about our bodies may shape our lives in profound and sometimes painful ways. Experiences of oppression and marginalization take root in our psychological lives, and may do damage to our sense of bodily safety and wholeness.

Often people seek counseling or psychotherapy in those moments when coping mechanisms break down and no longer work for us, or when losses or absences (of love, of freedom, of health, for example) feel too much to bear alone. The process of collaborating with a therapist offers the experience of having another mind to help untangle the knots of complex feelings, through a relationship in which suffering can be recognized and transformed. Awareness of patterns that limit or hurt us can lead in therapy to the discovery of new ways of caring for ourselves, of getting through the world with more agency, health, and happiness, of being more genuinely, fully with others.