ACT
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
Clarifying values, making room for difficult internal experiences, and taking meaningful action.
Psychodynamic and EMDR therapy in Santa Cruz
Understanding how you came to be here can create room for something new.
Whether you are coming to therapy individually, as a couple, or as a family, the work can offer a place to understand your experience with honesty, curiosity, and compassion. Together, we will explore both what is happening now and the patterns shaped by earlier relationships and experiences—engaging the deeper process while also building practical tools that make everyday challenges more manageable.
Depth and practical support
More than one way into the work.
My foundation is relational, attachment-focused, and psychodynamically informed—but my work is not limited to one orientation. I integrate approaches according to what you need, what we are trying to understand, and what will be most useful in the moment.
DBT
Dialectical Behavior Therapy
Strengthening emotion regulation, distress tolerance, mindfulness, and interpersonal effectiveness.
CBT
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Understanding how thoughts, behaviors, and emotional responses reinforce one another.
IFS
Internal Family Systems
Meeting protective and vulnerable parts with curiosity rather than shame or force.
EMDR therapy
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing
EMDR therapy offers a structured way to process traumatic or distressing experiences that remain active in the nervous system. Preparation, pacing, and your sense of choice remain central throughout the work.
Psychodynamic therapy
Psychodynamic therapy explores how earlier experiences, attachment patterns, protective strategies, and processes outside immediate awareness shape present emotions and relationships—creating room for insight and new choices.
In our work together
We make room for insight, feeling, and new experience.
Notice what happens in the present
We pay attention to thoughts, emotions, body cues, and relationship dynamics as they arise—not only after the fact.
Understand the deeper pattern
We connect present struggles to the meanings, roles, and protective strategies that have shaped your way of relating.
Practice a different relationship
Therapy becomes a place to express needs, experience repair, hold more than one truth, and discover choices that once felt unavailable.
Build support you can use outside the room
When helpful, I offer psychoeducation, mindfulness, regulation practices, and concrete ways to respond to difficult moments.
This approach may fit if
You want more than advice or symptom management alone.
- You are curious about why familiar patterns keep repeating.
- You often understand other people more easily than you understand your own needs.
- You want therapy that is emotionally attuned and thoughtfully active.
- You value practical support, but do not want to rush past the deeper work.
- You are looking for a relationship where honesty and repair are part of the process.