My ideal client is someone who shows up ready to try. All I ask for is an openness to explore. Many people start therapy not knowing what they need to work on or realize along the way that they want to focus on something else entirely. We’ll experiment. Sometimes we’ll fail. Sometimes we’ll redefine failure. Most importantly, we’ll try again. I particularly enjoy working with adolescents and emerging adults. A person’s teens and twenties are a time of tremendous intellectual and emotional growth. With that comes changes in relationships with families and friends and the challenges of figuring out who they are and who they want to be. I enjoy
getting to be a part of exploration. My focused specialties include the following: anxiety, depression, communication skills with parents and peers, sexuality, chronic pain, school stress, and test anxiety.

My other passion is working with members of the LGBTQA+, consensual non-monogamy/polyamory, and kink communities. Members of these communities often find it challenging to find mental health providers who fully understand the unique challenges faced by these individuals and who are culturally competent to work in these areas. My focused specialties in this area include exploration of identity, sex positivity and communication around sex, coping with jealousy, communication skills, discrimination issues, and family dynamics.

In my 20+ years of teaching teenagers, my motto was “I believe that understanding ‘the why’ is an essential part of learning.” I guided my students through collaboration, exploration, and “figuring it out.” This is also at the core of my approach to therapy. My role as your therapist is to help you identify and change the things that are getting in your way. I have an informal, conversational, and what one client described as an “easy and approachable” style. Each person is an individual, so each person’s course of therapy will be different. However, my core philosophy is deeply rooted in a humanistic orientation. I believe in an eclectic approach that employees techniques from person-centered, acceptance and commitment, mindfulness, gestalt, and existential therapy. Mutual respect and cooperative exploration are
my guiding principles. I believe that you are the expert on you. My role is to help you get to know yourself by exploring with you who you are, what you think, and how you feel.

Before becoming a therapist, I spent over 20 years working with high school students as a tutor/independent teacher. My students had always turned to me for social/emotional support and to ask questions from a trusted adult who wasn’t a parent, so the transition felt natural to me. I also have two adolescents of my own, one in college and one in high school. We laugh a lot, explore the questions that make us human, despair over politics, and then crack each other up some more. Between the various members of our household, we cover most of the colors of the Pride flag. We are a quirky, non-traditional family and are proud of it.

A Chicago native, I did my undergrad at the University of California-Berkeley, where I studied theatre and business. In what feels like another life, I was the managing director of a professional theatre company, a grant writer, and a fundraising professional. I was also a member of the steering committee for MassEquality, representing the Boston Chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW), when we fought for same-sex marriage rights in Massachusetts. In my free time, I enjoy reading, yoga, swimming, paddle boarding, listening to music, and hiking in the woods.