Couples and Relationship
Therapy
We're all a little weird, and life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in to mutually satisfying weirdness - and call it love - true love. Robert Fulgham
About Me
I have been in practice for over 20 years. Throughout this time, a common theme that has resounded is a struggle to balance the different parts of ourselves that vie for attention. We feel conflicted between the desire for connectedness and separateness, for healthy entitlement and support for another person, for safety and security and for novelty and fun. Good relationships, regardless of the structure, require each of us to hold onto ourselves while remaining in contact with others.
I am honored to help you work through the family patterns, personal stuck points, and often unconscious dynamics that create upset in your life. Moreover, I work with all types of relationships.....married, partnered, non-monogamous, same-sex, and gender non-conforming.
Experience & Training
I attended UC Davis and CSU Sacramento and received a Masters in Counseling Psychology. My educational background is rooted in psychodynamic/object relations and family systems theory. Here I learned that we tend to, although often innocently, create similar painful relationship patterns in our adult lives that we learned as "normal" in our families.
Post-graduate training includes gestalt group therapy, Internal Family Systems, and Relational Life Therapy (RLT). I am a certified RLT therapist and have found tremendous success helping clients work from this frame. I am also a Level 2 trained IFS Therapist.
My group therapy training has also included an 8 year research study funded by the Office of Child Abuse Prevention in affilation with Yale University and UC Berkeley where I led clinical groups with all different types of families. Here I helped parents, whether together or not, learn how to co-parent effectively, and develop respectful and connected relationships for the support of their children.
