The goal of psychoanalytic therapy is to relieve mental and emotional distress.

This type of therapy does not follow a script. It is a collaborative, unfolding process where we explore what emerges, as it emerges. As we talk, we begin to notice the emotional themes and relational habits that may be keeping you confined or disconnected from yourself, from others, or from the life you want to live.

Therapy offers the opportunity to build a relationship that is attuned, respectful, and open that can support healing at the nervous system level. Over time, many people find they feel more alive, more connected, and more able to be themselves.

So much of what we feel and remember lives in our bodies. I often invite attention to sensations as ways of listening more closely to our experience. Somatic awareness helps reveal patterns of holding, tension, or numbness that once helped us stay safe. By noticing these signals together, we create space for new feelings, meanings, and ways of being to emerge.

Our earliest relationships shape not only our emotional landscape, but our brains and nervous systems as well. When those relationships are nurturing or “good enough,” our brains develop a strong foundation for resilience, trust, and emotional balance. But when there are traumatic experiences or inconsistency, our nervous systems can stay in states of alert or shutdown–sometimes long after the original experiences are over. 

Neuroplasticity allows us to achieve healthy attachment in adulthood even if we didn’t have it in early life. Psychoanalytic work can offer a new experience of connection that can create the foundation for deeper, more satisfying relationships in your life today.

My practice is informed by my background as a student of meditation and Buddhist and Contemplative psychology. These traditions share an understanding that each of us has inside of us an inherent clarity, wisdom, and goodness. Contemplative psychotherapy invites us to turn toward our experience not as a problem to fix but as a meaningful expression of our journey through life.

At the heart of many indigenous worldviews is the understanding that healing happens in relationship—in our relationship to ourselves, to others, to the land, to those that came before us, and to something greater than ourselves. 

From this perspective, emotional pain is seen not just as a personal problem, but often as a response to disconnection or loss of meaning. Finding our way back to purpose and direction involves seeing and feeling into our connection not only with ourselves but also with our loved ones, our community, and the world around us.