How I Work
I’m not a therapist who plans to sit quietly, nod thoughtfully, and make you guess what I’m thinking for fifty minutes.
I listen closely. I ask questions. I notice patterns, make connections, and tell you what I’m wondering about. I’ll offer a perspective when I have one, challenge something when I think it might be useful, and say when I’m not sure. I think good therapy involves both of us being curious about what is happening and willing to change our minds when something doesn’t fit.
My work is integrative because people are complicated. Sometimes we need to understand something differently. Sometimes we need a skill. Sometimes we need to practice doing something differently even while our brain is loudly objecting. And sometimes understanding something intellectually isn’t enough—we need an experience that reaches us emotionally or changes something our nervous system learned a long time ago. My background in acting, movement, and performance has probably made me particularly attentive to that last piece: the body, emotional availability, responsiveness, and the difference between understanding an experience and actually being in it. Those ways of thinking are especially relevant when I work with performers and other creative people, but they influence my clinical work more broadly.
So I move between different kinds of work depending on what seems to be maintaining the problem and what actually helps. Therapy with me can be practical, emotional, analytical, experiential, playful, uncomfortable, or unexpectedly funny. Often it’s several of those in the same hour.
Your goals guide where we’re going. My job is to bring everything I know to helping us figure out how we might get there.
The Relationship Is Part of the Work
The relationship between therapist and client isn’t just the setting where therapy happens. It can also tell us something.
I pay close attention to how an experience feels from inside your particular world—not only whether I can intellectually understand the story. I’m interested in what gets easier or harder to say, what happens when emotion enters the room, where we suddenly become very serious or very funny, and what we may both be noticing before either of us has words for it.
I’m also a human being in the room with you. I respond. I laugh. I can be moved. I may tell you what I’m noticing in myself when I think it could help us understand something happening between us. I try to use those responses thoughtfully rather than pretending therapists somehow stop being people when the session begins.
That also means I will sometimes misunderstand you. If I get something wrong, I want to know. Repairing a misunderstanding can teach us as much as getting something right the first time—particularly when someone has spent a lot of their life adapting to other people rather than expecting to be understood.
For me, attunement isn’t about perfectly mirroring someone. It’s about staying curious enough to keep finding them.
Understanding, Choosing & Changing
Insight matters. But knowing why you do something does not always make it easier to do something different.
Much of this part of my work draws from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). We might slow down a sequence to understand what happened, what you noticed, the story your brain told about it, what you felt, what you did next, and what happened because of that. Finding the right place in that chain can give us somewhere useful to intervene.
In CBT, I’m less interested in replacing “negative thoughts” with positive ones than in interrogating them: Is this accurate? What evidence are we using? What are we predicting? What assumptions have quietly become facts? We may also use behavioral activation, exposure, narrative work, or behavioral experiments to see what actually changes.
ACT sometimes asks a different question: What if the goal isn't to make the thought or feeling go away? Cognitive defusion helps us notice that having a thought and obeying it are different things. Values work helps us identify what we actually want to move toward, while acceptance and committed action can help us move in that direction even when uncomfortable thoughts and feelings come along.
I also draw from Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), particularly its concrete skills for emotional regulation, distress tolerance, mindfulness, and relationships. Sometimes insight is the intervention. Sometimes what we need is a skill we can use Tuesday afternoon when everything goes sideways.
The goal isn't to control every thought or feeling. It's to have more flexibility in what you do when they show up.
ADHD: Maximizing How Your Brain Works
ADHD is often talked about as a problem with attention and hyperactivity. That can miss an enormous amount of the experience. Executive function, motivation, reward, emotional regulation, time, working memory, and our ability to access what we know when we need it can all be part of the picture. Sometimes that means knowing perfectly well what you need to do and still finding yourself unable to reliably make yourself do it.
My ADHD work draws heavily from CBT, but gets very concrete. We may take apart an everyday problem and find exactly where the process breaks down: starting, sustaining attention, shifting tasks, estimating time, tolerating boredom, organizing information, or returning after an interruption. Then we experiment—changing the environment, externalizing steps, adding cues, reducing the threshold for starting, or using novelty, structure, and reward more deliberately.
I also pay attention to the biology underneath the experience. That includes motivation, reward, and dopamine, but also factors that can change how ADHD shows up over time. With women, I consider hormonal changes across the menstrual cycle and larger transitions such as perimenopause, particularly when shifts in estrogen appear connected to changes in executive function, mood, or emotional regulation. When ADHD and PMDD overlap, tracking what changes across the cycle can become especially important.
And ADHD treatment isn't only about getting more done. Years of struggling to reliably access our abilities can create shame, avoidance, anxiety, perfectionism, and mistrust of ourselves. CBT and ACT can help us work with those patterns while executive-function strategies address the practical problems underneath them.
I have ADHD myself. I don't have a perfect system to hand you—and I wouldn't trust one that claimed to be. I approach this work experimentally: understand your particular patterns, try something, see what your brain actually does with it, and keep what helps.
Sex Therapy: Getting Specific
Sex can be weird to talk about. It can feel private, vulnerable, embarrassing, or taboo—and sometimes we haven't had many opportunities to think openly about our own sexuality, much less develop a relationship with it.
In sex therapy, I try to make the vague specific. Rather than stopping at “I don't want sex anymore” or “sex makes me anxious,” we might slow the experience down. When does desire appear or disappear? What happens in your attention and body? What are you anticipating? What meaning does sex have in that moment? What happens before, during, and afterward? The details can help us understand whether we're working with desire, anxiety, attention, shame, trauma, relationship dynamics, learned expectations—or several things interacting.
We can approach those patterns cognitively, behaviorally, relationally, or experientially depending on what we find. Sometimes the work involves communication or changing behavior. Sometimes it involves examining beliefs, expectations, avoidance, or the conditions under which desire actually becomes possible. And sometimes exploring sexuality leads directly into identity: what feels authentic, what feels performed, and which ideas about gender, queerness, relationships, or sex we inherited without consciously choosing them.
I don't start with an idea of what your sex life should look like. I want to understand how yours works.
Trauma: When Understanding Isn’t Enough
Sometimes we understand exactly why something is happening and our body still responds as though the old conditions are present.
That is one reason my trauma work moves between cognitive, emotional, relational, and experiential approaches. Different parts of an experience may need different kinds of attention. Sometimes we need to examine what trauma taught us. Sometimes we need to understand the protective responses that developed around it. And sometimes we need an experience that reaches somewhere insight alone hasn't.
CPT — Changing What Trauma Taught Us
Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) is one of the more structured approaches I use for trauma. It focuses on the meanings and conclusions we can develop because of traumatic experiences—particularly around safety, trust, power and control, esteem, and intimacy.
We may identify beliefs that became stuck, examine the evidence supporting them, and distinguish between what actually happened and what you learned to believe about yourself, other people, or the world because it happened.
The goal isn't positive thinking. It's greater accuracy and flexibility. A belief may have made enormous sense in the circumstances where it developed without being equally true everywhere else.
IFS & Parts Work — Getting Curious About Protection
Internal Family Systems (IFS) and other parts-informed approaches offer a different way into the same territory. Instead of immediately trying to eliminate avoidance, anger, perfectionism, shutdown, hypervigilance, or another response that is causing problems, we can become curious about what it is trying to accomplish.
What is it protecting? When did it learn that job? What does it expect would happen if it stopped?
I don't require someone to adopt a particular way of thinking about “parts.” What matters to me is the shift from How do I get rid of this? toward Why might some part of me have needed this—and what does it need now?
Experiential & Attachment Work
At times, I also draw from Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT) and other experiential approaches when understanding something intellectually isn't reaching the emotional experience underneath it.
That might involve slowing down what is happening in the moment or using imaginal revisitation and rescripting—vividly returning to an experience and introducing protection, agency, understanding, or connection that wasn't available then. Because vivid imagery can engage some of the same neural and physiological systems involved in lived experience, this can offer another way of working with what the brain and body learned.
We aren't rewriting what happened. We're creating an opportunity to experience something differently now.
Sometimes change comes from understanding something differently. Sometimes it comes from experiencing something differently. Often, we need both.
Couples & Relationship Work
Couples can become remarkably good at having the same fight in completely different forms.
In couples therapy, I'm interested in the pattern underneath the content. We may slow an interaction down almost frame by frame: What happened first? What meaning did each person make of it? What emotion appeared underneath the reaction? What did each person do to protect themselves—and how did that protective response become the exact thing that activated the other person?
That means I’m paying attention to several levels at once. There is each person's individual history, nervous system, needs, fears, and ways of making meaning. And then there is the relationship itself: the patterns the two of you have created together, often without either person consciously choosing them.
My work is active. I may interrupt an interaction, help one person say something differently, ask the other to tell me what they actually heard, or slow us down when I think we've just passed something important. Sometimes we need to understand the pattern. Sometimes we need a concrete skill. And sometimes we need to practice having a different interaction while we're actually together in the room.
I incorporate all of the approaches discussed on this page into my couples work when they're useful—including CBT, ACT, sex therapy, trauma work, and attachment and experiential approaches. That gives us different ways of working with communication and behavior while also making room for neurodivergence, sexuality and desire, emotional regulation, jealousy, trust, agreements, family history, and different relationship structures.
I'm not particularly interested in deciding who won the argument. I'm interested in helping both of you understand what keeps happening between you—and creating enough room for something different to happen next.
How We Decide What to Do
I don't begin therapy with a predetermined sequence of interventions. We decide what to do based on what we're trying to change, what seems to be maintaining it, and what happens when we intervene.
Sometimes we need skills before we can safely or effectively do deeper work. Sometimes understanding a pattern differently changes it. Sometimes someone has understood something for fifteen years and another insight probably isn't going to move the needle. Sometimes processing trauma changes something that years of trying to manage anxiety never quite reached.
And sometimes we try something and it doesn't work.
That matters too. I think of response to treatment as information. If something isn't helping, we get curious about why, reconsider what we thought was happening, and change course. I don't need my original hypothesis to be right. I want the work to be useful.
The approach can change as you do.
Work With Me
You don't need to know which kind of therapy you need—or even have a perfect explanation for what is happening. Figuring that out together is part of the work.
I work with adults and couples through telehealth and am currently accepting new clients.