Individual psychotherapy can be very helpful to many people who find life more difficult than they would like it to be. Starting psychotherapy is not easy. I respect your decision to start this work and I will help you navigate the most appropriate treatment choices. When you come in, I will listen carefully to what you are going through. It is important for me that you feel safe and respected. Together we will try to understand your challenges and begin to make helpful changes. You will not be labeled. We will figure out the goals of treatment and work towards your chosen goals at your own pace.
Mental distress rarely happens out of the blue. Most often, these issues arise in the context of problematic relationships with family members, friends, romantic partners, or co-workers. I will help you make sense of what is going on in your relationships. We will work together to identify what you wish for in your relationships, as well as your fears, goals, and obstacles. We will find out what makes you feel stuck or hopeless. We will talk about the patterns in your relationships, or specific interactions with your partners or family members that make you feel at wit’s end.
Some of the most common reasons we seek psychotherapy are depression and anxiety. Depression is quite often driven by a chronically elevated and dysregulated anxiety. In some circumstances, anxiety disorders lead to severe depression or panic attacks. I specialize in these conditions.
I will help you identify which kind of anxiety you are suffering from. Yes, there are distinct types, and they vary in symptoms. I will help you demystify the different kinds of anxiety from something vague and nebulous to something you can recognize and identify. I will do my best to help you minimize the mental pain associated with these conditions and decrease the risk and the intensity of the future episodes.
I treat acute, complex, and attachment trauma, commonly called Acute PTSD and Complex PTSD (c-PTSD). My training included comprehensive trauma-specialized coursework. I have studied neurobiology and psychology of acute and complex trauma thoroughly. My paper on working with trauma in psychotherapy won an award from the American Psychological Association, Division 29 and was published in a peer-reviewed journal Neuropsychoanalysis in 2014. I continue to study post-traumatic conditions, including dissociative disorders.