About my Practice

Using compassion, experience and humor, I provide a safe environment for people to explore and express themselves without fear of judgment or shame. My practice style is collaborative, warm, intuitive, and client-centered. I’m very engaged in session, asking thought provoking, meaningful questions. Through our sessions, clients develop a better understand of themselves and work toward reaching their treatment plan goals:

Therapy together can help:

  • Help to emotionally regulate in stressful, anxiety-provoking situations.

  • Free you up from unhelpful beliefs that are preventing you from pursuing the life you want.

  • Lighten your load by processing grief and difficult emotions.

  • Clarify purpose and strengthen your ability to ask for what you need—and set boundaries around what you don’t.

  • Connect with your core being. Better understand the world and who you are in it.

  • Make sense of difficult, confusing emotions you’ve long been avoiding.

  • Nourish your individuality so you can fully and powerfully live the life you want.

  • Free yourself from beliefs and expectations that have prevented you from living life fully and passionately.

  • Encourage fuller and more nourishing relationships with self and others.

  • Build more trust and intimacy in relationships with others.

  • Create a more joyous and meaningful existence.

  • Foster a deep sense of trust in your knowledge, intuition, and life decisions.

I’m a licensed psychotherapist in California (LCSW #113604) and Illinois (149.018285) with clinical training and experience in attachment-focused, relational, and psychoanalytic work.  Amongst others, I like to integrate the following styles and techniques. Psychodynamic, depth, and relational. I’m 100% committed to your growth.

Family dynamics and estrangement

Relationship issues, marriage, and divorce

Self-compassion and self-worth

Emotional regulation

Trauma/CPTSD and PTSD

Infertility

Grief and loss

Psychedelic integration/existential depth work

I have extensive experience in:

Schedule a Session

We’ll start with a 20-minute phone consultation to see if working together feels like a good fit. From there, we’ll schedule a 50-minute intake appointment to address your needs and expectations of therapy. We’ll start exactly where you’re at, in the present moment. After our third session, we’ll establish your therapy goals and decide how often we’ll meet. Each client’s treatment plan is unique.

Fees

50-minute Individual Psychotherapy Session — $185

50-minute Couples Psychotherapy Session — $195

Psychedelic integration session — $200

1 Hour Supervision for therapists — $125

A select number of sliding scale spots are available for clients who qualify. Feel free to ask me about this.

I am in-network with BCBS PPO of Illinois. For other insurance groups, I’m happy to provide monthly superbills that you can submit to your insurance company for partial reimbursement for OON psychotherapy, if available, based on your plan and deductible. For this, I recommend you call your insurance provider to clarify what they cover. It is the client’s responsibility to understand their insurance plans and seek information about their company’s reimbursement process.

About me

I graduated from Portland State University with a Master of Social Work in 2012. In 2014, I completed a yearlong fellowship at the Chicago School of Psychoanalysis. I also hold a certificate from the Ketamine Training Center in 2019, where I trained under Phil Wolfson. I’ve worked with psychedelic integration in several Ketamine clinics in Chicago, as well as individually in my private practice. I’ve also completed the Level 1 Gottman training for couples counseling with John and Julie Gottman.

When I’m not doing therapy, I’m often writing, reading, hiking, cooking, enjoying music, and spending time with friends and loved ones.

I also hold a Master of Fine Art in Creative Non-fiction and have published a memoir, House Rules, about my own experience growing up with an abusive father and coming to terms with familial estrangement. I’m currently working on a second memoir about how childhood trauma informs our adult selves, relationships, and life decisions.

Quotes

“I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become.”
― Carl Jung

“Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
― James Baldwin

“One has to be wounded to become a healer.”
― Marie Louise von Franz

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
― Lao Tzu

“The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It's the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.”
― Lois Lowry

Safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk

“When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.”
― Ralph Ellison

“Courage doesn’t happen when you have all the answers. It happens when you are ready to face the questions you have been avoiding your whole life.” ― Shannon L. Alder