About Me
The time for you is now.
Welcome! I’m glad you are here taking this important step on your healing journey. I specialize in helping others heal from trauma. I am a survivor of much trauma and have done life-changing healing of my own developmental trauma. It is my passion and life’s purpose to help others tap into their own incredible and innate power to heal themselves. The freedom is just on the other side of the trauma. It is profound and doable and you deserve to and can heal too.
There’s a complex relationship between our current distress and our patterned nervous system responses. Our nervous systems are wired to respond to threats, the deepest of which are issues of safety and attachment. These are very intricately linked with the experience of shame. Our systems become overwhelmed and go into our survival responses – flight, fight, freeze, appeasing, dissociation, etc. Daily life can trigger the activation in our nervous systems and those responses get activated and we get stuck in these patterned responses. It might look like anxiety, depression, shame spiral, sleep disturbances, physical symptoms, addictions of all types, including substances, etc. These are just some of the manifestations of unhealed wounds. Deep and permanent healing requires healing of the nervous system. It’s very important to understand that all of these survival responses are how we made it through to where we are today. This is how your system protected you to survive the trauma.. You are probably here because these responses are no longer serving you.
We all hold trauma, which includes historic / generational trauma.
We are wounded in relationship, and we heal in relationship. In therapy, we take a very gentle approach to connecting with the wounded parts of ourselves accessing the neural networks connected to them, and processing the trauma, somatically, in the body. When we fully process the trauma, it will not be there to be activated by current events in our lives anymore. There is tremendous freedom, just on the other side of the courageous journey to heal. We do this tender work together.
I would love to accompany you on your own healing journey.
My Practice: I’m an expert in treating trauma and have worked with trauma for over 30 years. I’m a Brainspotting Consultant. I have been in private practice for over 20 years. I work virtually, and can work with anyone in the states of California & Arizona. I am trained in many trauma treatment modalities including Internal Family Systems IFS/Parts), certified in EMDR, certified in HeartMath, Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Flash, Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB), and I’m also a Reiki master teacher, certified medium and intuitive healer. My primary modality is Brainspotting, and I incorporate other modalities.
Education/ Experience: I received a BA in psychology with an English minor, from San Diego State University (SDSU) in 1992, where I graduated magna cum laude.
I received an MSW (Master of Social Work) from SDSU, for which I was awarded a CALSWEC stipend, in 1996.
I received a BA in psychology with an English minor, from San Diego State University (SDSU) in 1992, where I graduated magna cum laude and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. I received an MSW (Master of Social Work) from SDSU, for which I was awarded a CALSWEC stipend, in 1996.
Social Work Career: After graduate school, I worked with trauma for 30 years in a variety of capacities and roles (while simultaneously maintaining a small private practice) including schools, adolescent treatment programs, group homes, family support agencies, and public child welfare in San Diego, Oakland, and Los Angeles.
I had many roles in my twenty-year child welfare career where I worked with community partners and governmental agencies to create and enhance collaboration and participated in and led teams to develop innovative public child welfare programs that are being replicated in the United States. These programs redesigned systemic approaches to better support vulnerable children and their families, decrease time spent in out-of-home (“foster”) care, increase children’s connection to their families, created permanent families for children, increased oversight of mental health services to youth in foster care who suffer the greatest struggles, including programs to monitor psychotropic medications and implementing and overseeing psychiatric discharge planning conferences. I initiated a collaboration with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, where I led a team to implement an outreach program for parents incarcerated in all of the Los Angeles County jails and coordinated much media coverage of this program. I was awarded the coveted National Association of Counties (NACO) award for the development of the Parents in Partnership program – a peer mentorship program. I found the impact of this macro work quite rewarding. I had also been often frustrated by the lack of access to deep healing services, understanding that healing is the key to breaking the generational cycles of the trauma that I saw so many suffering. I ultimately left the field of social work to pursue my calling of full-time private practice, as I had always intended.
