I enjoy my work as a clinician, educator and consultant—there is nothing I would rather do! My life experience is diverse and broad-based, encompassing arts, business (both for profit and not for profit), classical languages, and direct action advocacy. I have encountered and worked with family challenges and lifecycle concerns including immigration, parenting, bicultural and tricultural families, disability, divorce (including legal and financial aspects), as well as aging and health. I have been a licensed marriage and family therapist since September 2003, and opened my private practice in October 2016. Between 2006 and 2013 I was adjunct professor in the Marriage and Family Therapy graduate program at USF–Sacramento Campus, teaching a total of 44 units. Since 2003 I have been involved successively as organizer, presenter, consultant and moderator with the Oxford Symposium in School-Based Family Counseling, an annual international, multidisciplinary conference to build theory and identify and disseminate best practice in helping at-risk students thrive in the education setting.
As a consultant to prelicensed and licensed therapists, my specialty is in client case conceptualization—what are the clinician's beliefs and intentions about treating this client? I am also co-founder of two licensed therapists' case conceptualization groups.
As an educator I hold trainings and presentations for prelicensed clinicians on a variety of clinical issues. My book Intentional Intervention in Counseling and Therapy was published by Routledge in July 2017. Written for a readership of beginning and prospective therapists and their educators, Intentional Intervention answers three questions: What heals in counseling and therapy and how? What actions in clinical decision making ensure optimal outcome for the client? And why are some clinicians more skillful than others, apparently remaining so over time?
As a clinician, my therapeutic orientation is grounded in humanistic thinking. My developmental counseling and therapy theory allows me to look at how you are responding to and making sense of your experience both cognitively and emotionally, and to identify which parts of yourself you must augment to rise and better respond to the challenges you face. I am trained in self psychology as well as in family systems, which means I will be giving attention to how you relate to those around you, and to how the people around you behave towards you.
What heals in counseling and therapy is the clinician's extending self to the client to further the client's development. The understanding we forge together of how things inevitably got to be the way they are is at once both cognitive and visceral: we feel it. And now you are strong enough to break the cycle and come into your own.