ABOUT ME
My personal roots and professional practice
My practice
As a therapist and coach, I believe in first creating a working relationship with you based on enough trust to traverse the ‘shadow’ territory of relational trauma. While I consider it the job of psychotherapy to reconsolidate the burdensome memories of interpersonal trauma, doing so requires resources, including practices that help us care for our bodies. We can then tend better to the health of our important relationships as partners, parents, and friends. My combined therapeutic and spiritual leanings have most recently led me to train in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, SOMA and Holotropic Breathwork, and Evolutionary and Archetypal Astrology.
My current mission is to integrate these newer practices for healing and growth into the approaches to healing trauma I already practice, as they best serve my clients and are requested.
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Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT)
Relational and Modern Psychoanalysis
Reiki
Holobody Coaching
Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy
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Master’s Degree in Clinical Psychology, 1991
Master’s Degree in Architecture, 1986
Master’s Degree in Comparative Literature, 1980
HOW I WORK
At the heart of my approach is a belief that we all already possess the wisdom and capacity to heal and grow from within.
I offer my expertise and resources to facilitate healing, support your growth, and nurture your ability to enjoy life.
Awakening to the role of the body
The more experience I have gained in working with relational trauma, especially treating the aftermath of sexual abuse, the more I have realized the critical role the body plays in both holding the memory of trauma and healing it. From this awakening, I pursued a series of body-oriented trainings - from EMDR to the Wheel of Consent. I also realized that healing from trauma has to move us beyond it, into the richer life that it can block, and moving on is often best served by a focus on strengths and resources through coaching.
I offer both in-person sessions in Berkeley, CA. and online. While I prefer meeting in person when possible and safe enough, I’m flexible and base this choice on the needs and preferences of those I serve.
Work with me in-person or online
Explore my journey
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As the only child of pre-WW2 German immigrants who settled in California but relocated every year of elementary school, I come to the field and practice of psychotherapy and coaching from a history of challenging ruptures, transitions, and re-orientations, and so think of my work as an art of balancing growthful disruption and change with necessary integration and stability.
I inherited an orientation to personal growth and ‘awakening’ from my parents’ devotion to Eastern and pre-New Age religious philosophies prior to the 60’s, but in my late teens disengaged from religious belief by following the teachings of J. Krishnamurti, as the paradox of following an ‘anti-guru’ with much wisdom but no taste for devotees gradually sunk in.
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Although I initially majored in psychology, even the radical theories of the 60s left me wanting a more experiential and experimental education. Because I was learning more about my own psychology by progressively surrendering my native tongue to think and relate in foreign languages, I changed majors. This shift led me back to family origins through a junior year abroad in Heidelberg, where I also studied Russian, Italian, and even Sanskrit.
This led to graduate study in Comparative Literature at U.C. Berkeley in the late 70’s, where I was drawn to psychoanalytic literary theory and criticism, began a series of my own therapies, and planned on writing a dissertation on how authors I loved use narrative style and technique to give voice to so-called ‘pathological’ states of mind like schizophrenia and dissociation.
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When I realized I was becoming a career academic, I made another radical shift into graduate Architecture out of an old love of traditional Japanese aesthetics, and its influence ‘mid-century modern’ architecture. I had also done a lot of design-build work crafting furniture and remodeling houses, out of a desire to be creative with my hands. When this too felt like a professional detour, because not psychological and interpersonal enough, I returned to Psychology at the age of 35 to train as a psychotherapist.
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After studying Family Systems, I interned in a clinic that specialized in treating sexual abuse in families and has made working with trauma, dissociation, and men as survivors a core focus of my career ever since. For 2 decades after 2001, I was part of a team of therapists facilitating intensive weekend retreats for male survivors. At the same time, I pursued strong interests in the emerging field of Relational Psychoanalysis and the evolving practice of Couples Therapy because I believed then, and do now, that the greatest pressure, need, and opportunity for personal growth happens in our most intimate relationships, like marriage, parenting, therapy, and mentorship.