My Approach to Psychotherapy

Even when you feel stuck, hopeless, or overwhelmed, there lies a power within you to choose, connect, find clarity, feel relief, and grow.

-Thích Nhất Hạnh

“Lotus flowers will only grow in mud. It is the mud of life that offers the nutrients for our souls to strength and our hearts to grow.”

At the core of my approach to therapy is a fundamental belief that each and every one of us has this innate capacity to heal, grow, connect, and sense what’s right for us and make choices accordingly, like an intuition.

However, things like adverse childhood experiences, intergenerational trauma that is passed down, and living in a world shaped by settler colonialism and systems of oppression, often make it difficult to access and trust this innate capacity, even if it’s always there.

In addition to helping you meet your specific needs and goals for therapy, I see part of my role as supporting you in reconnecting with this capacity for healing, inner wisdom, agency, and authentic voice and strengthening your relationships with yourself, others, and the world.

  • trauma and (C)PTSD

  • attachment wounds & inner-child work

  • anxiety & depression 

  • people-pleasing and codependency/self loss

  • disability, chronic pain + illness

  • grief and loss

  • loneliness, connection, & authenticity

  • racial and cultural identity; immigrant experiences

I explore many different topics and concerns with my clients but have the most experience and interest in:

  • gender & sexual/affectional identity exploration

  • asexuality and aromanticism

  • neurodivergence and (un)masking

  • needs, boundaries, communication, & conflict

  • ENM, polyamory, and/or relationship anarchy

  • childhood emotional neglect and abuse

  • impacts of oppression, marginalization and/or privilege

  • relationship to body

-parts work + internal family systems therapy (IFS), relational-cultural-therapy, feminist therapy

-trauma-informed therapy + the importance of ongoing consent & collaboration with my clients

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non-pathologizing and liberatory frameworks & the understanding that the personal is political (a la the Combahee River Collective, Audre Lorde, and others.) Mental health symptoms are reasonable responses to systemic oppression, and there are still ways to access more relief, clarity, and use our relative amount of power and agency within these systems.

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the belief that there is no one right way to heal alongside the perspective that somatic awareness/connecting with feelings through the body when it feels safe enough is a gateway to deeper and more sustainable healing

-the importance of healing and growing in community rather than in isolation

-creativity, joy, humor, and delight. It’s important to feel difficult feelings, and I also love exploring what’s bringing my clients joy, interest, + pleasure, sitting with the more “positive” feelings, laughing(!), and expanding what therapy gets to look like

While my approach is tailored to each of my client’s specific needs, goals, and experiences, my work is informed by:

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My work is also informed by these additional lineages and people, some of whom I have worked with directly and many whose work has inspired me from afar:

disability justice (Sins Invalid, Alice Wong), abolition (Mariame Kaba, Ruth Wilson Gilmore), harm-reduction, body + sex neutrality, neurodivergent + autistic empowerment (Nick Walker), health at every size + fat liberation (Sonya Renee Taylor), Black feminists, storytellers, and liberation visionaries (Alexis Pauline Gumbs, June Jordan, adrienne marie brown, Octavia Butler, Sherronda J Brown). Indigenous ways of knowing (Robin Wall Kimmerer, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson).

Decolonial frameworks for psychology, trauma, and therapy (Dr. Jennifer Mullan, Frantz Fanon). Radical approaches to mental health, love + relationships, conflict, and accountability
(Mia Mingus, Oumou Sylla, Hailey Magee, Margeaux Feldman, Dean Spade, Kai Cheng Thom).

South Asian writers, organizers, & activists (Arundhati Roy, B.R. Ambedkar, Yashica Dutt, YaliniDream, & Sarah Thankam Mathews)

Moreover, I have learned so much from Natalie Gutiérrez, Sand Chang, Tamala Floyd, and Kim Paulus re: how to practice parts work + IFS in ways that feel authentic to me and center the impacts of systems.

Thank you to these and many other guides, peers, comrades, and my clients, who I am always evolving with and learning from too.