How I think about therapy
People find themselves on "the couch" for an astonishing number of reasons. Sometimes it’s a painful breakup, conflict at work, anxiety, or grief. Sometimes it’s less obvious. It could be reacting in ways that surprise you or don’t make sense to you like becoming angry or shutting down without being able to manage it.
Suffering brings people to therapy, and so does the confusion of not understanding yourself or how your life got the way it did.
I view symptoms as clues. We follow them to understand how they connect to the bigger picture of the person experiencing them. Often, we find that ways you’ve learned to protect yourself once made sense. They helped you stay resilient and maybe even successful.
Over time, some of those ways of protecting yourself might come at a cost you couldn’t foresee. Together, we work to understand what's being protected, slowly letting go of the more costly ways of protecting yourself, while helping healthier, less costly ways grow — maybe uncovering new ways of seeing yourself.
Growth can look like…
Tolerating a mistake without spiraling.
Getting through conflict without shutting down.
Speaking up for yourself when you used to stay quiet.
Trusting yourself to take on the unknown.
It’s different for everyone, because the process itself is different for everyone.
I'm a licensed clinical psychologist, PsyD, and I practice long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy, a form of depth therapy, with adults and families across Los Angeles, including Encino and West LA, and virtually throughout California.
This approach helps us go beyond the surface to understand ourselves and others as complex people. The main idea is that when we can understand our complexities, the more at ease we feel in our lives.
Therapy doesn’t look like someone telling you, “If you do x, y, and z, then your suffering will decrease and your life will improve.” Although it sounds so appealing, lasting change rarely comes from following a set of instructions or finding the right advice. Because each person has their unique set of lived experiences, I take a nuanced and individualized approach with each person I work with.
We grow in pairs.
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What remains constant is my curiosity, presence, and consistency, so we can develop a relationship together to help empower you from the inside out.