Individual Psychotherapy

Psychotherapy can be helpful when you are facing a specific challenge or feeling uncertain about the direction of your life. You may notice repeating emotional or relationship patterns, feel stuck, or sense that something needs to change.

At other times, what brings you to therapy may be harder to name. Life may appear to be functioning reasonably well, while something feels unsettled, repetitive, or incomplete.

My approach is grounded in relational and depth-oriented psychotherapy. While relief from symptoms matters, our work can also look beneath them, toward the underlying patterns, experiences, relationships, and less conscious forces shaping your experience.

Therapy is a collaborative process. Together, we bring greater awareness to what may have been operating automatically, creating more room for choice in how you relate, respond, and live.

The aim is not insight for its own sake, nor simply a return to how things were. Psychotherapy can create the conditions for development, greater authenticity, and the possibility of transformation.

Areas of Focus

Relationships & Recurring Patterns

Our relationships can reveal patterns that are difficult to see elsewhere. We may find ourselves repeatedly pursuing, withdrawing, accommodating, controlling, protecting, or longing for something that remains elusive.

Therapy offers an opportunity to understand these patterns, their origins, and the ways they continue to shape relationships in the present. With greater awareness comes the possibility of participating differently.

Life Transitions & Individuation

Periods of upheaval do not have to be understood only as disruptions to overcome. Changes in relationships, work, family roles, identity, or stage of life can expose ways of living that may no longer fit.

These periods can also become opportunities to shed outgrown identities and become more curious about what may be trying to emerge.

Therapy can provide a space for that emergence and for the gradual process of becoming more fully oneself.

Men's Work

Men often receive powerful messages about which parts of themselves are acceptable and which should remain hidden.

Therapy can provide a place to look behind these cultural and personal masks and develop greater access to emotion, vulnerability, intimacy, strength, anger, tenderness, and uncertainty.

The goal is not another prescription for how a man should be, but a more conscious and authentic relationship with oneself and others.

Meaning, Identity & Existential Concerns

Not every reason for entering psychotherapy is best understood as a symptom or diagnosis.

Questions of meaning, purpose, identity, isolation, mortality, and the direction of one's life can become increasingly important, particularly during periods of transition.

Rather than trying to eliminate these questions, psychotherapy provides a place to engage them seriously and explore what they may be asking of you.

Substance Use, Misuse, Addiction & Recovery

I have more than two decades of experience working with problem substance use and addiction from an inclusive, harm-reduction perspective.

I work with people at different points in their relationship with substances: those beginning to wonder whether their use has become problematic, those wanting to make changes, people pursuing or established in recovery, and people who want to understand their relationship with substances more deeply.

Meeting you where you are without judgment, we can balance practical strategies for safety and change with a deeper curiosity about the underlying function of substance use in your life.

Abstinence does not need to be a prerequisite for psychotherapy, nor does substance use need to become the sole focus of our work.

For some people, reducing or stopping substance use is only the beginning. Psychotherapy can offer an opportunity to understand what remains, what the substance may have provided or protected against, and what might now need to develop in its place.

Beginning Therapy

Finding the right therapist matters. I offer a free initial consultation so we can talk about what brings you to therapy, what you are looking for, and whether working together feels like a good fit.

I see clients in person at my Oakland office and provide telehealth psychotherapy throughout California.