About

I have been a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California (LMFT) since 1991, having experience in private practice doing individual and couples therapy in-office and online; and helping soldiers and airmen do problem solving to obtain resolution in overcoming obstacles of everyday living . I do NOT work with deep trauma and PTSD but stick to short-term solution focused problem solving and skill building to accomplish transformation in one’s life. Before this I was a RN who tended to patients needing acute and medical surgical care , which helped me better understand people’s suffering when undergoing physical pain and illness. I interact with clients dealing with issues of codependency, relationship problems, unresolved conflict, grief and loss, and struggling with more than average difficulty adjusting to everyday problems, symptoms of anxious feelings and depression that won’t go away, stress, major life transitions and needing coping skills to prevent relapsing into unhealthy addictive patterns. I help people find meaning and be functional in relationships through introspection and understanding one’s thoughts, feelings and behavior. As connection deepens due to self-awareness and release of bottled up emotions, goals can be established and steps taken to expand personal growth. Changing one’s lifestyle and adopting good habits like consistently overriding negative thinking and impulse driven behaviors prevents sabotaging inner needs and feeling overwhelmed. I draw from an eclectic background that includes Rogerian based listening focusing on empathy and compassion, solution focused brief therapy, motivational interviewing where clients are encouraged to resolve ambivalence and take productive action for positive change, cognitive behavioral therapy where false perceptions of the self are challenged even though they seem factual but are unsubstantiated, systems theory which views one’s situation based on “the big picture” and connecting to our culture and family of origin and how they influence current thinking, and emotionally focused therapy which gives strong support for healing past emotional wounds and living with wholeness in the current moment.