My work focuses on tracking your emotional experience to help you achieve greater emotional awareness and mastery. I am explicitly affirming and validating, actively noticing growth-oriented intentions within behavior. Not a “blank screen,” I am emotionally engaged and self-disclosing of how I am touched, moved by your emotional experiences. I will let you know what I’m thinking and feeling as it relates to how I am thinking through, making sense of, processing, or being impacted by your internal experience. Theories of attachment, emotion, neuroscience, experiential approaches that focus on the here-and-now inform my approach to create meaningful change.

My approach to individual psychotherapy is informed primarily by relational psychoanalytic and psychodynamic theories. I have engaged in training based on contemporary psychoanalytic approaches (relational, object relations, attachment-based, developmental model, self psychology) since 2002 through clinical work, individual supervision and case consultation, group supervision, classes, and case consultation groups through the Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies. I am also trained in short-term dynamic experiential therapy approaches, specifically Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy, and Internal Family Systems therapy. I have specialized training in trauma/PTSD treatment and work with minority populations. I specialize in work with clients who have long-standing emotional and relational difficulties, usually given histories of relational trauma, such as abuse, neglect, or chronic misattunement in families of origin.

My approach to couples therapy is informed by the Gottman Method for Couples Therapy, Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples, the Developmental Model for Couples (which integrates theories of attachment, differentiation, and neuroscience), and Relational and Intersubjectivity Theories from the psychoanalytic traditions.