Beginning therapy can be scary and it is my goal to make you feel safe and empowered in our time together. I work collaboratively with people of all ages to help them better understand their emotions and their experiences. I look forward to speaking with you!
A fundamental belief of mine is that children (and all people) do their best when they can. There can be many signs that your child is struggling to do their best: acting out, emotions that seem uncontrollable or unpredictable, withdrawal, loneliness, declining school performance, and more. If you feel as though your child or teenager is not “doing their best,” it is likely that there is something keeping them from being able to lean into their true abilities and express themselves in healthy, adaptive, genuine ways.
I love partnering with families to assist them in better understanding their child’s complex needs and helping them learn how to attend to these needs from a place of empathy, boundaries, and co-regulation. I believe that the whole family constellation has an impact on a child’s well-being, personality formation, and behaviors, and I work to integrate all aspects of the family system and their cultural beliefs into the therapeutic work.
An essential aspect of therapy is safety and security. I aim to create a safe, empathic space for my clients to be able to boldly express their emotions, learn how to better understand themselves and others, and process difficult experiences that continue to impact them today. The therapeutic relationship is foundational, as this relationship creates the groundwork for safety, vulnerability, and the “working through” process that facilitates long-term growth and desired change. An open and honest therapeutic relationship allows individuals (of all ages!) to embody healthier relationships with people in their own lives. This is especially important to me when working with children and parents, as I seek to not only create a safe, healing relationship with the child but also to facilitate growth within the parent-child relationship, which research demonstrates is the most foundational and formative relationship in any child’s life.
Developmentally attuned for all of life’s stages
I was trained from a developmental perspective in a variety of settings, including community mental health agencies, college counseling centers, and psychiatric hospitals. I work primarily with children, adolescents, families, and young adults and value integrating various therapeutic perspectives and techniques to meet each individual’s needs. Therapy can look different for everyone depending on developmental age, presenting concerns, family needs, and abilities of each individual, and should not be a one-size-fits-all experience. With young children, therapy may look like using imaginative play to help the child better understand their internal world and emotions that they may not be able to describe with words just yet. With school-aged children, therapy can consist of using drawing, art, games, and more to provide them with coping skills for overwhelming emotions. And of course, therapy can look like traditional “talk therapy,” where I work with clients to help them organize their life experiences by empathically and collaboratively sifting through the difficult “stuff” with them.
Credentials as a Psychologist
Post-doctoral Fellowship, Coastal Therapy Group
Pre-doctoral Internship, University of Texas Health at San Antonio (Child & Family Track) (APA Accreddited)
Doctorate in Clinical Psychology (PhD), Rosemead School of Psychology, Biola University (APA Accredited)
Masters of Arts in Clinical Psychology (MA), Rosemead School of Psychology, Biola University (APA Accredited)
Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Spanish Studies (BA), Seattle Pacific University, WA
