Individual Therapy

According to research we have upwards of 70,000 thoughts a day. Most of them pass through us without so much as a “second thought”, but all are informing a sense of how we feel about ourselves, about the world we live in, about the abundance or the scarcity in our lives. 

Our thoughts create our feelings and vice versa. For so many of us, “feelings” become an overwhelming, incapacitating part of our existence. What if you didn’t fear feelings? What if you had a clearer understanding of what thoughts had informed those feelings? These feelings and thoughts, which create anxiety, depression, worries, concerns or obsessions etc., can and must be dissected and understood. With insight and understanding comes relief.  Situational pressures, breakups, job loss or confusion, a sense of purposelessness, become existential crisis.

In my work with individuals we closely examine the myriad of thoughts that pass through you daily. How do they make you feel? How do they inform your behaviors? It can occur in opposite as well. “I got a feeling he didn’t like me”. The feeling set up thought patterns of insecurity. Which comes first? How? Why? With empathy, insight and understanding, I work with clients to intervene in this process so that you are not just a firestorm of thoughts and feelings, but rather a mindful creation of what you want to feel. Making choices of what you want to think. What do you choose to believe about yourself? What is the narrative you have created for your life and is it accurate? Unpacking childhood memories and life experiences, understanding attachment complexities and desensitizing traumatic events that occur within our lives become primary objectives in the work. Processing in a more adaptive, healthy response with these relationships, traumas and experiences follow.

Together, with love, compassion and understanding, I gently help my clients discover how to live their best and fullest life, expressing the most authentic representation of self that one can be. 

Child & Family Therapy

Your child is the most precious vessel in your life, and finding a trusted therapist to address your child’s emotional challenges is one of the toughest decisions a parent can face.  Engaging with children in a safe, supportive way has been a lifelong passion of mine.  I was blessed to be raised in a household that was joyous, accepting, filled with music, and also filled with children.  My mother was a music therapist for children with special needs and disabilities, and observing her connect through music to deeply impaired youth had a profound impact on my life.  Her example taught me to understand and engage children at their level, and I have taken those lessons into my therapeutic process, whether it be working closely with troubled children and teens throughout the Los Angeles County Unified Schools district, or engaging with children in my private practice. 

My approach to child therapy is two-pronged. First, I seek to engage the child as an active participant in the therapeutic process. Deploying imagination, play, art, music, breathing, dancing, and energy work, the purpose is to build deep trust and communication at a level the child can embrace and that feels authentic to the child’s experience. Since children clearly do not have the communication skills of adults, building this connectivity, sense of safety, and environment of trust is vital. This is often accomplished through transitional objects, such as toys, dolls, and musical instruments. This signals to the child that our communication will take place at a level which is understandable to them, as well as comfortable and trusting. Once this attachment has taken place, it then becomes possible to infuse and suggest different thought and behavior patterns that address the child’s underlying issues.

Building this foundation of trust with the child is vital, but it is often just the first step. The second element of my child therapy practice is to fully enlist the family in understanding, supporting, and resolving the child’s emotional challenges.  Clearly, the family and parenting dynamic is critical to the child’s behavior. Yet truly understanding that family dynamic is a sensitive process, especially given the enormous pressure parents are under in today’s world to be, simply put, perfect. My approach with parents is to, first, actively defuse this “perfection pressure.” No parent is perfect, and a key step is to uncover and explore the internal parenting dynamic absent the external pressures parents face today.  Another key step is active “re-parenting” where I work closely with parents to identify different parenting techniques that will help support the child’s therapeutic process.

A holistic approach to child and family therapy is critical to long term healing and opening new, positive behaviors. Crafting a trusting, safe, and child-centric environment is a lifelong passion and a key part of my overall practice.

Grief & Loss

While the loss of loved ones is a natural and normal part of life, loss that is unexpected, untimely, accidental, or drawn out, may lead to trauma for those left behind. The grief associated with such trauma can be debilitating and, perhaps even more challenging, isolating. Such grief can also have a cascading effect, leading to deeper depression, anxiety, fear, and maladaptive behaviors to address these overwhelming emotions.  While grieving is natural and must run its course, I believe strongly that any loss can be helped through exploration of the corresponding emotions and behaviors with an objective and trusted therapist.

My approach to grief and loss is anchored in my own experience. Having lost most of my family over a very brief window of time, I know well the many emotions that accompany such unexpected and sudden loss. My treatment approach is a merger of my clinical skill set with a deeply empathetic ear, anchored in the coping mechanisms I personally deployed to help manage the many transitions through my own grief.  In my work with my patients around loss and grief, I focus on navigating the negative emotions that can accompany loss (guilt, anger, hopelessness, overwhelming sadness) while, over time and when appropriate, jointly crafting with my patients a narrative that celebrates the life of those that have moved on, and facilitates the release of those emotions that can keep patients “stuck” in the trauma of unexpected loss.

LGBT Counseling

Members of the LGBT community face unique and multifaceted challenges that add additional layers of complexity to the therapeutic process.  It is vital that therapists working with LGBT clients have a deep understanding of these challenges in order to serve as an effective partner in the journey of self-discovery.  My work with LGBT clients, as well as my own personal experience, have taught me that throughout each stage of life, LGBT persons are confronted with issues and prejudices that can be easily internalized, resulting in a profound struggle within themselves trying to maintain a healthy sense of self, self-confidence, and self-acceptance.

Indeed, for many LGTB persons, these issues begin early in youth: a significant portion of the LGBT community have faced down unaccepting parents and families, bullies, and, at times, a deeply prejudiced society that teaches from birth that LGBT persons are defective and unworthy.  These are messages that wound at a fundamental level and, unfortunately, can reinforce an internalized message of unworthiness and defectiveness.  Left unexplored, these external attacks on the self can manifest in many ways: shame which leads to substance abuse, reckless sexual behavior, an inability to sustain long-term intimate relationships. 

Another unique aspect of my work with the LGBT community is the continued reverberation of the AIDS crisis that swept the community in the 80s and 90s.  While we have made enormous strides in both understanding and the treatment of the HIV virus, learning of an HIV positive diagnosis remains a traumatic life event, where one’s sense of self may become gravely damaged or perhaps even destroyed.  In addition, a large portion of the LGBT community directly experienced the peak of the AIDS crisis, and faced the untimely loss of beloved friends and colleagues, leading to intense bereavement, grief, and the relentless death of entire communities. The effects were and are ravaging; the trauma intense and enduring.

Furthermore another challenge facing this generation of openly gay men is that they are the first entering old age openly gay and out of the closet. How to not become invisible to the community, disappear and lose all sense of oneself becomes a vital priority. There have been few role models, no one demonstrating how to age in a successful, happy, purposeful way. So with age comes the loss of physical vitality and attributes, which for many gay men has been the leading currency of their lives. How does one reinvent oneself so as to stay vital and relevant, or risk slipping into the invisibility cloak that old age often brings upon gay men and people in general? 

In treating the LGBT community, I strive toward creating and fulfilling a sense of completeness and wholeness within the self. Working empathically, slowly and deliberately to heal old wounds, and eradicate the innate sense of defectiveness. Always seeking to understand the sources from which that sense of defectiveness derived. With insights, understanding, processing and evaluating we then begin to reinstate a sense of enough-ness, perfection (even where there may be imperfection), wholeness, and completeness within and unto the self. It is a journey of self discovery which I have lived, understand and continually work on healing. 

Slowly building understanding and conviction that the LGBT person is as complete and perfect as any other differently sexually identified person. The goal is to create and improve a strong, authentic sense of self, not one that needs to be propped up by the creation of a “false self” in order to be loveable or to feel adequate and enough.

EMDR Therapy

EMDR – Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing is a proven psychotherapy practice developed by Dr.Francine Shapiro that offers an alternative or adjunct approach to talk therapy. The concept is based on bi-lateral stimulation of the brain, which involves sets of rapid eye movement that trigger stimulation between the left and right hemisphere. This process can be accomplished through a range of stimulation, including eye movement, tapping, sounds, or pulsors.

This bi-lateral stimulation desensitizes traumatic events that have been stored in the brain’s neuropathways. Through carefully structured interactions, the EMDR therapist is able to help the client unpack both complex and simple traumas; the technique is also effective for repressed and surface traumas. EMDR therapy has been peer reviewed and published in hundreds of scientific journals and is regarded as a highly effective and specialized form of therapy.

Perhaps one of the greatest benefits of EMDR therapy is the speed with which it can bring traumatic events to the surface, accelerating the ability of the patient to heal and understand the traumatic event. Once the acuity of the patient’s response to the trauma has been diminished, the therapist then works with the patient to reprocess the emotions embedded with the traumatic event.  This results in a more functional, stable experience of the trauma, often resulting in a dramatic decline in the anxiety and fear that patients associate with the event.

I was trained in EMDR therapy at EMDRIA, the organization founded by Dr. Shapiro and her colleagues. The process entailed rigorous training, testing and supervision. I offer EMDR therapy both concurrent with regular talk therapy or as stand-alone sessions.

Addiction

Addiction of any nature is a profoundly challenging constellation of behaviors to understand, address, and ultimately replace with healthier choices. Addiction is further complicated by the strong likelihood that co-occurring conditions will accompany the addictive behavior: anxiety, depression, and other mental health challenges often go hand in hand with compulsive behavior. As a result, grasping the full breadth of the patient’s behavior and background is vital to treatment, but that is just one piece of a holistic approach. Fundamentally, addiction treatment must address the fact that at the heart of compulsive behavior lies a sense of self.

The truth is, at some level we are all wounded or, indeed, fractured. The challenge for those suffering addictive behaviors is that the wounds are so profound that the only way to find relief is to engage in maladaptive behaviors. In fact, the truly nefarious aspect of addiction is that while it is rooted in a fractured sense of self, the addictive behavior itself blocks the patient’s ability to empower and re-structure their internal narrative.  Addiction is not only the crutch that soothes the fractured self, it is also the barrier that prevents a new self-empowerment to emerge. This creates a vicious cycle, and the common emotional aspects of addiction then dominate the addict’s self-narrative: guilt, shame, hopelessness and despair.

The essence of overcoming addiction, and the core of my treatment philosophy, is the desire and ultimately the decision to live your life in a new and different way. This decision is extraordinarily difficult and requires a comprehensive set of tools to sustain it over a lifetime. The good news is that the scientific underpinning of addiction treatment is making extraordinary progress. My practice for addiction seeks to understand and suggest new therapeutic options, and to pair those with a deep exploration to the source of your maladaptive behaviors and the experiences that fractured your original sense of self. My goal is to create a safe, trusting and healing environment to explore these core issues and to re-create a new self-narrative, replacing addictive behaviors with new coping mechanisms and actions. Ultimately, my goal is to re-assemble the fractured self, leading to a newly empowered individual with the skillset to begin a completely new, nourishing, and rewarding life.

Contemporary Issues of Aging

For many, the great fear of aging is irrelevance. This often leads us to run from the truth of our aging bodies, and to avoid a direct confrontation of the many changes and transitions that occur as we enter our later years. My treatment philosophy on aging is grounded in the concept that aging requires us to find a new relevance: an inward journey that allows my clients to face the truth of aging, and to embrace that truth with a vibrant, colorful, and engaged vision of the aging process. In this area of my practice, I offer skills that are necessary as the body and mind transitions, and tools to help manage the many conflicting emotions that can arise, particularly in our youth-obsessed culture. I help guide you through the transformation from the self-imposed fear of aging to embracing the permission to age with grace, dignity, and a firm sense of self.

Trauma

Trauma affects our lives in many, many ways. There are complex traumas which occur when an individual endures ongoing, long-term and repetitive abuse of some nature- be it physical, sexual or emotional. Simple traumas, while limited to a single event, are just as devastating for the emotional well-being of the patient. Trauma can be debilitating, lead to addictions, cause unconscious behavior patterns, be completely repressed, and significantly impact our interpersonal and familial relationships.

My therapeutic approach to trauma, offers a nurturing, systematic, and comforting methodology that quietly explores the nature of the trauma in a safe and gentle environment.