My Approach to Helping
Psychotherapy is a unique process of discovery and growth, occurring in the special context of a private, containing and facilitative relationship. To know ourselves well and deeply, we need and deserve the patient, present and thoughtful witnessing of another human being. We bring into psychotherapy and analysis our sorrows and dreams, our wounds and talents, our ugliness and our beauty; our full humanity. Through gentle, gradual unfolding, we get to reach together into the places in you that have not been broken, tarnished or maimed by whatever cruelty, injustice or invisibility you have lived through. And, as we develop a relationship to this untarnished core, you may find yourself coming alive again into our whole soul, body, mind and heart.
I tend to work well with people who are soulful, thoughtful and creative. Many of the people I work with have always felt different from their families and communities, and have found ways to challenge or question the given norms of their worlds. I welcome all outsiders into my practice.
I have particular interest and calling in working with those who carry in their hearts and spirits the wounds of personal or ancestral trauma through war, immigration, sexual violence, persecution or oppression based on race, religion, ethnicity, gender expression or sexuality.
More Info About My Practice
My own journey towards becoming a psychotherapist and analyst began in 1998, when I had the privilege of supporting sexual trauma survivors as a volunteer at the Jerusalem Rape Crisis Center. It was at this incredible grassroots organization that I first encountered the profound healing potential that opens up when one person listens to another and witnesses their truth. I learned how rich, difficult and beautiful this healing journey can be, and have felt honored ever since to accompany people of all genders along this path.
I hold a Masters’ degree in Clinical Psychology with Social-Clinical focus from the New College of California, and a California license as a Marriage and Family Therapist. I am a certified analyst member at the San Francisco Jung Institute. I lecture at Jungian societies and consult to other psychotherapists.
Of the many theories I have learned and that have shaped and informed me, I mostly draw from Jungian, psychoanalytic and relational ways of working, as well as self-psychology, social justice and feminist frameworks. This means that I am deeply interested in the human unconscious as manifest in dreams, fantasies, religious and spiritual feelings, and in the ways our inner lives manifest in our bodies. And, I am equally interested in the interpersonal world, where our ethical calling towards kindness, care, consciousness and justice manifest in the actions we take in the greater community.
My Therapy Focus
The work of C.G. Jung greatly influences my work. Jung fought hard to show that spirituality, creativity, and the search for meaning and wholeness are important forces in us humans, no less so than the search for power and sexual fulfillment that Freud emphasized. Analytic Jungian work takes a multitude of forms, and is flexible and unique to each individual. It seeks to support each person in discovering, unfolding and living as close as possible to the totality of their whole personality. This kind of soulful, deep inquiry requires from both analyst and patient a genuine spirit of open-mindedness and humility. We are invited together to accept what is yet unknown, unreachable or even unthinkable in each person's very being.
This work unfolds differently for different people; for some, it is through relating to powerfully resonant images and symbols that appear in dreams, through sand-play or drawing, or spontaneously when engaging the imagination; for others it is through quiet contemplation; for others yet it is through bodily sensations, emotions or intuition that contact with what Jung Called "the Spirit of the Depths" becomes accessible to dialogue and mutual learning.
Differently from traditional psychoanalytic work, this kind of depth psychotherapy does not require a certain number of weekly sessions. Another important aspect of this work is that the goal of "individuation", which was Jung's term for the process of coming into wholeness, does not end at the personal level of the individual's relationship with themselves, but rather goes further into an ethical calling to engage with the world with the same spirit of inquiry, responsibility, and acceptance as one has with their own selves.
