I’m a registered associate clinical social worker and psychotherapist in California (#ASW126369). I see young people and adults experiencing problems with living, whether in work, school, play, relationships, or making meaning in their lives. This may show up as challenges with self-esteem, questions related to identity, experiences of grief and loss, body-based and somatic issues, unsatisfying patterns in relationships (personal and professional), creative impasses and blocks, feeling lost or hopeless, excessive worrying, difficulty metabolizing traumatic experiences, and both over-constricted or overwhelming emotional states. Many of these issues commonly coincide with symptoms related to anxiety, depression, and trauma.

Among colleagues I have a reputation for being warm, thoughtful, collaborative, and engaged. I bring a sensitivity to my patients’ uniquely experienced and intersecting identities both as they’re experienced in the social environment and as they appear “in the room” between us.

I work from a perspective that’s informed by contemporary psychoanalytic psychotherapy and Mentalization Based Treatment (MBT). These approaches emphasize our shared role in working together around the challenges that bring you to therapy, thoughts that are difficult to think and feelings that are difficult to feel.

If you’re curious about working together, a phone consultation or first session is a good place to start. If either of us feel you might be better served elsewhere I can provide an appropriate referral.

I’ve worked in a variety of roles throughout the field of mental healthcare: as a crisis counselor for the Suicide Prevention Center, a therapist for young people at the Venice Family Clinic, in an after-school program for teens aging-out of youth social services, and as a primary and group psychotherapist in the Adult Partial Hospitalization and Intensive Outpatient program at UCLA. More recently, I’ve conducted psychotherapy groups for patients hospitalized on the Adult, Child, and Adolescent Inpatient services in the Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital at UCLA. Currently I work as a therapist in private practice under the supervision of Dr. Penelope Katz (#LCS 18122) and Dr. Philip Lance (#PSY 26965).

Before training as a psychotherapist I earned a BA in Philosophy, Literature, and the History of Mathematics from St. John’s College, an advanced degree in Literature from the University of British Columbia, and worked in the trades and the arts. I earned my professional degree, a Masters of Social Work, from the Smith College School for Social Work. In addition to my graduate training, I hold a certificate in Psychoanalytic Social Work Practice from the Sue Fairbanks Psychoanalytic Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. I continue to pursue advanced training in Mentalization Based Treatment (MBT) through the Mentalizing Initiative in Los Angeles and to study relational psychoanalysis at the Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center in New York.

I engage professionally through supervision and consultation as well as membership in the American Association for Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work and the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology of the American Psychological Association (Division 39).