MY APPROACH
The first thing to know about me is that I am a genuine person—what you see is what you get. I value sincerity and will be real with you as I help you be fully yourself with me. I also strive to help people feel as comfortable as possible in the often unfamiliar situation known as therapy. I strive to strike a balance between listening to your story and helping to guide you in knowing what to address next. No one likes to feel lost and it's my job to build a roadmap with you so that we can work on the issues important to you.
What is Health Psychology?
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Health psychology is concerned with understanding how psychological, behavioral, and cultural factors contribute to physical health and illness. It is a way of looking at how health problems may have affected your emotional state, and how one's psychological functioning affects your health and body. In therapy with me, it means getting down into the details of how your body and mind can play off of each other, and looking at the big picture of how longer-term emotional patterns may have been impacting your body in harmful ways. Take a look at this blog post to learn more.
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Individual Counseling
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I am a psychodynamic psychotherapist by training, which is a kind of therapy that focuses on emotional and relationship patterns often learned in childhood that can be difficult to change. This training serves as the foundation to my treatment, whether or not we explicitly speak about your childhood experiences.
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I also use other methods to help my patients alleviate their distressing symptoms and find stability in relationships and in their emotional world. These methods include cognitive-behavioral therapy, solution-focused brief therapy, and systems theory, and may involve changes to your environment, your habits, your communication patterns, your thought patterns, or your outlook. I use these techniques to identify optimal interventions for your specific situation to alleviate symptoms getting in the way of having better days, weeks, months, and a better life.
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Therapy for Healthcare Workers
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The pandemic unmasked many of the issues with the healthcare system that healthcare workers already knew all too well. Whether these challenges manifest in physical exhaustion from working excessive hours in residency, or feeling emotionally depleted from giving so much of yourself, I will help you identify short-term stabilization techniques as well as long-term changes to reach your professional and personal goals. ​
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Approach to Diversity
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We are all unique and have different life experiences. We all have different combinations of privileges and disadvantages based on things we didn't choose, like our race, socioeconomic class, gender, sexuality, disability status, and culture. I believe that the more we understand about our unearned privileges and disadvantages, the better prepared we are to live a meaningful life. Various dimensions of our identities also impact how we respond to physical and mental health challenges, and is something I highly value as a part of treatment.
