About Me

I came to psychotherapy from an unlikely direction. I spent my 20s and early 30s working in finance (investment banking, mortgage securitization, corporate compliance, a few other things). I was good at it. But somewhere along the way I realized I was spending my days doing something that felt increasingly hollow. The pressure and stress could be a lot to manage, but what really bothered me was I felt like I wasn’t getting much in return. After some soul searching, I figured out that what I actually cared about was people: understanding them, connecting to them, helping them, and witnessing the process of genuine human change. So I went back to school, got my master's in Social Work, and became a therapist. It's the best professional decision I've ever made.

I mention the finance background not as a quirky biographical detail, but because it matters clinically. My understanding of corporate burnout is not abstract. What happens to people inside high-performance environments, the particular brand of anxiety that comes from working in places that normalizes overwork and measures everything by output, and the ways we talk ourselves into enduring it all, are lived experiences for me. When a client describes the feeling of lying awake running financial models in their head, or endlessly rehashing a meeting that went well but not perfect, or using alcohol to decompress after a long day or brutal week, I'm not nodding empathetically from across a wide professional distance. I know that world.

The clients I work best with and to whom I bring the most value are professionals dealing with anxiety and problematic substance use, often in combination. I've worked with attorneys, engineers, executives, corporate salespeople, finance managers, entrepreneurs, and others navigating the intersection of high-achieving careers and personal lives that are quietly suffering for it. I find this work meaningful and genuinely engaging, and I've been told I'm good at it.

My clinical training is ongoing. Since getting my LCSW, I've pursued intensive training in EMDR, which is the modality I find most consistently powerful and that changed my own life, as well as Internal Family Systems (IFS), Cognitive Processing Therapy and a number of other approaches that I integrate together in my work. I’m also trained in Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFT) which I find useful in both individual and relational contexts. I take professional development seriously because I think clients deserve a therapist who is current and skilled, not just credentialed. The fact that I derive both enjoyment and intellectual satisfaction from expanding and refining my skillset is icing on the cake.

I believe therapy should be focused, time-limited, and ambitious, and should be designed to produce real change on a realistic timeline rather than a vague improvement on an indefinite timeline. If you've tried therapy before and found it unsatisfying, there's a decent chance it was unfocused, undirected, or not particularly goal-oriented. That's not the kind of work I do.

I see clients in person at my office in Oakland and via telemedicine throughout California.