Individual Psychotherapy

At the heart of my approach to individual work in psychotherapy is the relationship between the client and therapist. The client—therapist relationship is unique. It’s a relationship that is close, consistent, caring, introspective, and supportive, yet it’s a relationship that is different from those that we have with family and friends.

Relational Psychotherapy is grounded in creating the conditions for greater attachment security. It leans into interpersonal regulation. It is committed to cultivating safety for the exploration of thoughts, feelings, memories, and experiences. It highlights client strengths while also devoting attention to areas for integration and growth.

Although the work that I do with clients is informed by a family systems view, we do not spend all of our time invoking the past. When we do look to the past, we do so as a way of illuminating, contextualizing, and understanding what is happening in the present, and as a way of envisioning new possibilities for the future.

People come to therapy for a range of reasons, but often, it’s because the discomfort, challenge, or pain of whatever they’re up against has become too much to bear alone.

I work with clients who are seeking to increase their experiences of intimacy, vulnerability, connection, and trust. I see clients who are exploring or expanding their sense of identity, sexuality, gender, and self-expression. I see clients who are dealing with family issues, life transitions, bereavement, and grief. And I work with athletes on performance, confidence, relationships, and life beyond sport.

Sexuality is a part of our lives. Whether one is partnered, single, allosexual, or asexual, having a therapist who is trained and experienced across a range of domains relevant to sexuality, gender, and self-expression can be crucial.

High-quality, comprehensive couple and relationship therapy often requires attention to individual’s and partners' sexual experiences, needs, desires, and concerns. All too often, couple therapists avoid this terrain, or harm clients, due to their own unexamined biases, lack of training, or hang-ups with respect to human sexuality.

As an AASECT Certified Sex Therapist and a PhD candidate in Clinical Sexology, I have specialized training in the intersecting realms of sex, gender, and sexuality. My work focuses on individuals, couples, and people in monogamous, open, and multi-partner relationships. I see clients across a range of identities and experiences. Regular themes in our work often include: communication, self-expression, creativity, curiosity, emotional and physical intimacy, sexual challenges or problems, and addressing unwanted physical or psychological pain.

We often work on deconstructing ideas about sex, gender, and sexuality, and on developing more expansive views of what is possible in clients' sexual lives and relationships. 

Clients often come in to address problems such as desire discrepancy, arousal non-concordance, erection difficulties, premature ejaculation, pain with sexual activity, and anorgasmia. 

I see clients who have experienced relational and sexual trauma, as well as those from high-control religious backgrounds, particularly as it relates to their relational and sexual lives. 

I work with clients who have experienced infidelity and other relationship agreement ruptures. 

I help clients explore thoughts, feelings, and questions about relationship structures, opening and closing relationships, renegotiating relationship agreements, and being in mixed mono/poly relationships.

I work with clients around fertility, pregnancy, parenting, and co-parenting.

I discuss hormonal and surgical care with cis, trans, non-binary, and other clients going through mid-life, transition, and other care.

I help clients navigate dating, sexual health, identity, and self-expression. 

In our work we talk about sex, sexuality, intimacy, and desire in ways that are clinically informed and educational while also being relatable and lighthearted. 

We work to address and reduce feelings of sexual shame and to build more authentic, fulfilling, and self-expressed sexual, personal, and relational lives.

Relational Psychotherapy can be a powerful approach in helping families to reconnect, to listen and share with empathy, and to repair old wounds. The communication techniques that are so effective in working with people in romantic relationships have similar transformational impact when working with parents, siblings, and adult children.

Whereas family therapy is often understood as an arena for parents and younger children, I typically work with parents and adult children who are in their twenties, thirties, forties, and beyond.

Adult family therapy is also a place for siblings, across the lifespan, to work on the relational challenges that are unique to the sibling experience.

Adult family therapy provides an opportunity for parents, children, and siblings to experience genuine breakthroughs in their relationships, to deepen communication and connection, to address old hurts, and to create new levels of closeness, vulnerability, and intimacy.

Although clients might aspire to achieve breakthroughs and deep connection as the ideal, sometimes the first step is simply to create a context in which family members can be heard.

Relational Psychotherapy is built upon the premise that relational safety and nervous system regulation are supported by experiences in which we feel seen, heard, felt, and understood.

Whether with individuals, partners, or families, these experiences help to make closeness, vulnerability, and intimacy possible.

Finding a therapist that is a good match can be challenging for anyone. This can be particularly true when the client happens to be a therapist themself.

Outside of our professional roles as therapists we have our own histories, challenges, limitations, and areas for growth. It is often those very histories and challenges that call us to the profession. 

Coming in for therapy, whatever one’s profession or circumstance, can be an act of courage, responsibility, and love for self and others.

Therapy for therapists is an opportunity to tend to oneself. It is a space to receive support in ways that friends, family, and partners might not be able to provide.

Psychotherapy with therapists is a process that I welcome and one that can be uniquely rewarding.

I work to create an environment where clients who are themselves therapists can be vulnerable and expressed without judgement, where support is available, and where we can move toward exploration, processing, integration, and relief.