WELCOME TO MY PRACTICE
We may sense that a better, deeper life is possible, but often we don’t experience this as our present reality. How do we lose our original openness of heart and awareness? And how do we return?
We have an innate desire and capacity to find our way past the habits, beliefs, and inner structures that sometimes seem to take over our lives. Psychotherapy can provide a context of understanding, support, and guidance to help in this process of remembering who we really are.
I am a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in private practice since 1984. I believe in the power of insight-oriented talk therapy to expand understanding, but its potential is realized only when compassion and mindful presence inform the work we will do together. Also learning to observe the body’s postures and gestures brings our understanding into the present moment. Together, these modalities help fulfill the promise that psychotherapy is a path to yourself. It’s a whole-hearted process that has the potential to open us to the here and now, restore contact with our original capacities, and transform relationships.
MY APPROACH
INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOTHERAPY
We’ll engage in a process of exploring the origins of patterning that interferes with your freedom to feel more spontaneously and understand more deeply. Even a person’s difficulties can function as a thread that leads back to original fullness and intelligence.
Early experiences of wounding, regardless of severity, result in our development of defensive structures that are meant to protect our vulnerability, but simultaneously create restrictions in our capacity to feel or perceive what actually is happening in the moment. That brings the past into the present, in ways conscious and unconscious, and this influences our interpretations of events. It shapes our perception of others, and also of ourselves.
Traditional insight-oriented talk therapy allows for an understanding which can harmonize our awareness with our everyday life. But we embody early experience in a way that limits the power of insight to undo, and also restricts our emotional intelligence. Psychotherapy which inquires into felt sense, emotions, and understanding is able to cultivate awareness of the whole person. Using all those ways, we can illuminate and work through the experiences that gave rise to inner patterning. This allows for a richer sense of self: the self of mindfulness.
I'm here to support and facilitate a shift that makes room for spontaneity, helps disperse fear and limitation, and enlarges the capacity for enjoyment, relationship, and creativity.
INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOTHERAPY
We’ll engage in a process of exploring the origins of patterning that interferes with your freedom to feel more spontaneously and understand more deeply. Even a person’s difficulties can function as a thread that leads back to original fullness and intelligence.
Early experiences of wounding, regardless of severity, result in our developing defensive structures that are meant to protect our vulnerability, but also create restrictions in our capacity to feel or perceive what actually is happening in the moment. Defensive structures bring the past into the present, influencing our interpretation of events. It shapes our perception of others, and also of ourselves.
Traditional insight-oriented talk therapy allows for an understanding which can harmonize our awareness with our everyday life. But we embody early experience in a way that limits the power of insight to undo, and also restricts our emotional intelligence. Psychotherapy which inquires into felt sense, emotions, and understanding is able to cultivate awareness of the whole person. Using all those ways, we can illuminate and work through the experiences that gave rise to inner patterning. This allows for a richer sense of self: the self of mindfulness.
I'm here to support and facilitate a shift that makes room for spontaneity, helps disperse fear and limitation, and enlarges the capacity for enjoyment, relationship, and creativity.
RELATIONSHIP COUNSELING
As in my approach to individual psychotherapy, I engage with you in a process of integrating understanding with present-moment inquiry, on our way to addressing the entanglements, projections, and negative emotions that manifest in a stressed relationship. Uncovering the inner images and interpretations that belong to each partner, and to the relationship itself, can restore you to your open, aware, loving potential. At one time, your relationship brought you into intimacy with your realness and aliveness, and that can be found again.
Loving and being loved pose direct challenges to our conditioned attachment patterns. About half my work in my practice over the past 30 years has been with couples. While my approach to couple counseling overlaps with my orientation to individual psychotherapy, there are special challenges to addressing communication, and differing inner images and world-views, when two people are experiencing difficulties between themselves. Cultivating authentic, fulfilling relationships requires a return to vulnerability which can be hidden when relationships have become stressful. We are separated from others, but also from the one we once were. Our own defenses defeat us, and our ways of trying to avoid hurts cost us our flexibility. How this happened can be grasped, and the desire for fresh contact is the beginning of regaining it.
PROFESSIONAL BIOGRAPHY
I’ve trained professionally in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction with Jon Kabat-Zinn, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Somatic Experiencing Level I one-year training, and Dynamic Attachment and Repatterning Experience. I'm a long-time spiritual practitioner, and currently a ten-year student in the Diamond Approach. My orientation to psychotherapy is to work through emotional, experiential, and somatically-based patterning without bypassing the power of understanding and mindful awareness to transform the suffering rooted in unconscious beliefs. Conditioning runs through the total being of a person. While we speak of “integrating” body, mind, and emotion, they’re not really separate. To me, the promise at the heart of psychotherapy is finding our felt, lived contact with the source of growth itself, allowing our capacities to mature and evolve.
You are welcome to call or email for an appointment, or with questions.
Offices in Berkeley and El Sobrante.
License #: LCSW71176