Therapy in Berkeley

Berkeley is full of people who have read the books. You can name your attachment style, trace the pattern to its origin, and explain your family system with real accuracy, and still be stuck in exactly the same place on a Sunday night.

Understanding something is genuinely useful. It is also, on its own, a place people get stranded, especially when analysis has always been how you stayed safe.

So the work here is often about moving from explanation to experience. What happens in your body when you say the true version out loud. What you do differently on Monday.

Graduate students, faculty, researchers, and people whose worth has been measured in output since they were teenagers all tend to carry a similar background hum: the sense that rest has to be earned and has not been yet.

Add funding uncertainty, an advisor relationship that may be complicated, and a schedule with no natural end, and it makes sense that anxiety here often looks like competence right up until it does not.

We take that apart without treating your ambition as the problem.

My focus areas are grief and loss, recovery from narcissistic abuse and relationship trauma, relationship endings and divorce, and the pregnancy, postpartum, and parenting years.

I use Acceptance and Commitment Therapy alongside a relational, trauma-informed approach. Practically, that means less debating your thoughts and more building a life you actually want while the difficult feelings are still around.

Sessions run by video from my Berkeley-based practice.