Why I do this work:

I see therapy as a place for you to explore and reclaim your power, understanding that our challenges do not take place in isolation but within many social systems with layered impact on our mental, physical and spiritual wellbeing. In the exploration of this impact, therapy can feel like a small revolution, by returning to us parts of ourselves which social oppressions have eroded or disowned.

My background is as an artist and educator, and I am rooted in anti-oppression and liberatory practice. As a Latinx-Jewish immigrant, I come from deeply collectivistic cultures, and the value and sacredness of reciprocal human connection drives my work.

My lived experience of immigration and acculturation led me to specialize on the many griefs and traumas of displacement, present or intergenerational.  I have a reverence for trauma work and show up fully to support you with compassion, insight, creativity, and shared trust.  Many theories of trauma all point in the direction of relationships: that the wounds that we sustain in this lifetime occur within our stories with others, and in the spaces where we seek safety or belonging.  

I have built my practice to focus on all things relationships: I work especially well with relational trauma, breaches of trust, repairing severed relationships, communication, non-normative relationships, as well as family & reproductive support.

My own experiences in the area of fertility/infertility, queer family making, and perinatal complications showed me firsthand the ways our society does not champion these powerful journeys fully or well. I am dedicated to supporting folks throughout pregnancy-ing, birthing, and parenting; including the joys, fears, grief, and trauma which very often intersect. I know how imperfect our health care systems can be at supporting birth and postpartum in the US, and I am fierce in bringing care and repair for you around these experiences. 

I am queer-allied, kink-allied, sex positive, trans affirming, anti-ableist (with a disability justice and neurodiversity informed lens), HAES-informed, and explicitly anti racist in my therapeutic work. All of my approaches consider the expressions of your many identities, and will focus on offering you support and earnest celebrations at each step of the way.

How I do this work:

I work with folks seeking an empowering and transformative experience of therapy. I am approachable and bring a solid, vigorous presence to our encounters - you will not feel adrift in our sessions. My style is engaged, directive, and sometimes humorous, and always tender and reverent of all of who you are. I believe in people being the experts of their own past and their many possible futures, and this orientation has me showing up with a radical sense of hopefulness and creativity to our every encounter. I value cultivating transparency and collaboration in our work together.

I am trained in expressive arts for trauma processing. Via simple, non-intimidating arts prompts we may find new points of entry into old stories, and source surprising or compelling meaning - on your terms. The arts also provide us with a wealth of tools for embodiment and nervous system regulation, as well as help us leverage our strengths (individual & cultural) for accessing newfound resiliency. I work with a variety of arts modalities, when and if client-appropriate and in support of client voice and choice. These encompass overlapping practices such as visual art, poetry prompts, body-based techniques, dramatherapy and more. I am faculty in a graduate program training expressive arts therapists with a social justice orientation, with the belief that the arts can contribute culturally-rich alternatives to the western-centric ways of conceptualizing healing and pathology. In our work together, we define wellness or un-wellness based on your beliefs, choices, and cultural alignment.

I practice primarily as a narrative therapist, influenced by relational and attachment approaches as well as Internal Family Systems, feminist psychotherapy, and existential and transpersonal approaches, and an intergenerational/systemic lens. I draw strongly from interpersonal neurobiology and neuroscience, such as polyvagal theory, and somatics. I use neuroscience to ground our understanding of what you may be going through. I am trained in NET, a radical and affirming trauma processing modality that empowers us to revisit your story on your terms

In my work with couples I draw directly from restorative and transformative justice, where I learned the values of radically shared wellness, a sense of wellbeing that is deeply accountable and co-constructed within each relationship (families, couples, polycules, etc). I have advanced training in EFT for working with couples, a compassionate and deeply effective attachment based approach for transforming relationship patterns.