My Story

Why I work this way

I grew up in New York City, which will always be home, but I was pulled to California twenty five years ago. I got my Master's in Social Work from NYU in 1998 and my Doctorate in Clinical Psychology from Ryokan College in 2006. Along the way I trained at the Payne Whitney Clinic and in the Pediatric AIDS Department at Beth Israel, then worked as a medical social worker at AIDS Healthcare Foundation and later at Cedars-Sinai's Home Hospice program. I've had a private practice since 2003, with some time away to raise my two sons, and I later worked as a primary therapist and clinical supervisor at a recovery center in Malibu.

I tell you all of that not to hand you a résumé, but because it's the reason I don't practice traditional talk therapy anymore.

Sitting with people at the end of their lives, in the middle of addiction, in the rawest parts of grief — you learn quickly that understanding a problem intellectually and actually being free of it are two different things. I watched brilliant, self-aware people stay stuck, not because they didn't understand themselves, but because insight never made it past their heads and into their bodies.

That's what sent me toward clinical hypnosis, and later toward somatic EFT. Not as alternative therapy, but as the missing piece — a way to work with the unconscious mind and the body directly, instead of talking around them.

I am a National Board Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist and a Certified Somatic EFT Practitioner on top of my clinical background. But mostly what I have learned, after three decades of this work, is that people don't need me to hand them answers. They need help clearing what is in the way, so they can hear the answers they already have inside.

That's the work now. Coming home to yourself — through hypnosis, somatic EFT, and nervous-system-aware therapy — in service of getting you back to who you already are.