Psychotherapy for Thoughtful Adults Seeking Lasting Change

Many of the people I work with are intelligent, accomplished, and deeply reflective. From the outside, their lives often appear successful. They have built meaningful careers, cared deeply for others, and worked hard to create lives they value. Yet privately, they may find themselves repeating painful relationship patterns, struggling with perfectionism, feeling emotionally disconnected, or wondering why achievement has not brought the fulfillment they expected.

They are often not looking simply to feel less anxious or less stressed. They are looking to better understand themselves.

Therapy offers a place to slow down, think deeply, and explore the emotional patterns that shape how we live, work, and relate to others. My goal is not only to help alleviate distress, but to help you develop a richer understanding of yourself that creates the possibility for meaningful and lasting change.

My approach to psychotherapy is grounded in the belief that our emotional lives make sense within the context of our histories and relationships. Rather than asking "What is wrong with you?", I find it more helpful to ask, "What happened to you?" Together, we approach your experiences with curiosity rather than judgment, working to understand how longstanding ways of thinking, feeling, and relating continue to influence your life today.

My clinical training and experiences have allowed me to work with individuals from diverse backgrounds struggling with a wide variety of personal issues. That said, while I maintain professional humility and consider myself a lifelong learner, past research, clinical, and personal experiences have allowed me to develop particular expertise in the following areas:

  • I have personal and professional experience with issues of identity development, belonging, and challenges that may arise in connection to these. While your current struggles may not be clearly related to these issues, it is important to consider the impact they may have on your life, if any. Speaking to someone who is well-versed in these areas can help you get a better understanding of how they may have influenced your past life experiences and thus played a role in your mental health.

  • At our core, we are all profoundly social in nature. Our relationships are the foundation upon which we develop a sense of who we are, our self worth, and how to behave in relation to other people. Depending on our lived experiences, past relationships may have created problematic dynamics that affect how we relate to others presently. These past relationships include those we have developed with our primary caregivers, friends, lovers, relatives, colleagues, or other peers. I have a special interest in helping people better understand how relationships throughout their lives have helped shape their current patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. While a lot of this work involves exploring past and current relationships to others, therapy is also a space where we can discuss our emerging relationship as well. Such explorations provide us with material to make sense of your relational patterns and how these may be related to your current mood and functioning.

  • Across different clinical settings, I have helped individuals struggling with changes to their mood, functioning, character, and overall outlook on life after experiencing a major life change. Major life changes can include, but are not limited to: breakups, new medical diagnoses, gender expansion or transition, immigration, anticipated or sudden death of loved ones, or shifts in school, work, and career. Depending on the nature and circumstances surrounding a major life transition, we may experience increased anxiety, sadness, sleep disturbance, changes to our interpersonal patterns, or general manner of being. Because life changes disrupt the equilibrium that once was, many of us can struggle to cope or adjust. Therapy can help you gain clarity and a better appreciation of how the changes you’ve experienced have impacted you, and how to move forward with your life.

Therapy May Be Especially Helpful If…

• You have achieved many of your professional goals yet still feel dissatisfied or disconnected.

• You often find yourself repeating similar relationship patterns despite your best intentions.

• Perfectionism or self-criticism makes it difficult to appreciate your accomplishments.

• You feel responsible for caring for others while neglecting yourself.

• You are highly insightful yet continue to feel emotionally "stuck."

• You are looking for therapy that goes beyond coping strategies to explore the deeper forces shaping your life.

What You Can Expect

Therapy with me is collaborative, thoughtful, and unhurried. I strive to create a space where you can think freely, speak honestly, and approach difficult experiences with curiosity rather than self-judgment. While insight alone is not always enough to create change, it is often the beginning of a more authentic relationship with yourself and with others.

  • I practice psychodynamic psychotherapy, a depth-oriented, evidence-based approach that seeks to understand not only what you are experiencing, but why. While reducing distress is certainly an important goal of therapy, emotional difficulties rarely arise in isolation. They are often shaped by longstanding patterns of relating, ways of understanding ourselves, and experiences that have unfolded over the course of our lives.

    Together, we approach these patterns with curiosity rather than judgment. We explore how earlier relationships, significant life experiences, and unconscious expectations may continue to influence the ways you experience yourself, your relationships, and the world around you. As these patterns become more fully understood, they often lose their power to operate outside of awareness, creating greater freedom, flexibility, and choice in everyday life.

    This work is thoughtful and collaborative. Therapy is not about receiving advice or learning a set of techniques to "fix" yourself. Instead, it is a process of developing a richer understanding of your emotional life so that change arises not simply from trying harder, but from seeing yourself more clearly.

    Many of the individuals who seek this kind of therapy are thoughtful, accomplished, and intellectually curious. They may have achieved significant personal or professional success while continuing to struggle with recurring relationship patterns, perfectionism, self-criticism, questions of identity, or a persistent sense that something important remains unresolved. They are often looking for more than symptom management—they are seeking a deeper understanding of themselves and the possibility of meaningful, lasting change.

    While psychodynamic psychotherapy often explores the past, its purpose is always rooted in the present. By understanding the emotional patterns that shape your life today, therapy can help you cultivate more authentic relationships, greater self-awareness, and a stronger sense of meaning and fulfillment moving forward.