Individual Therapy
Individual therapy is offered as weekly 50 minutes sessions tailored to meet the direct needs of the client. Sessions are a mix of exploring different topics through conversation, as well as experiential methods (i.e. guided meditation, sandtray therapy, creative arts etc). Below you’ll find a description of the different areas of concern that bring many of my clients to my office.
Couples Therapy
Couples therapy sessions range from 60-75 minutes in length and focus on the needs of the couple as a whole. In these sessions we’ll explore unhelpful communication patterns and how to shift them, unmet needs/wants in the relationship and ways to express them, and create new experiences for the couple to expand intimacy and connection.
Areas of Expertise
Relationships
Not only do I work directly with couples, but I’ve found many individuals seek therapy due to some form of relational strain. Understanding our attachment patterns can be hugely beneficial in helping us identify our needs and creating safety inside relationships.
*Codependency, children of emotionally immature or unstable parents, relational trauma, boundary challenges, difficulty maintaining long-term intimate relationships.
Trauma
We have all experienced some form of trauma in our lives, whether that’s been a big T “Trauma” like surviving a natural disaster, serious injury, or sexual abuse, or a little t “trauma” like a difficult breakup, unstable/toxic relationship, chronic stress/pressure. Each of these experiences deserve space to be processed compassionately and with the utmost care. Therapy provides clients with tools to better ground themselves, connect to their bodies in a safe way, and find healing.
Depression & Anxiety
Although depression and anxiety are experienced and expressed quite differently, they often share an undercurrent of fear and/or self-doubt and come with a very loud inner critic (i.e. “shoulds”). Therapy is an opportunity to better understand the underlying emotions, thoughts, and beliefs that keep us held back, and helps us to create new pathways of living and relating to ourselves and the world.
Inner Child Healing
We all carry younger parts of ourselves with us, even if it’s held in the subconscious. Inner Child exploration and healing is a place to connect to the part of ourselves that remembers our childhood emotions and experiences. As children, we do our best to cope and adapt to our environment. Sometimes those ways of coping stay the same even when the environment has changed. This is a place to begin questioning beliefs we may hold about the world, ourselves, and our needs, and to begin providing the support that may not have been available to us when most needed.
Cultural Identity
As a biracial Asian-American therapist, I’ve found a great need in our community for therapists that can better understand the nuance of growing up in a multicultural home or of having an unconventional identity development experience.
*Family of origin, conflicting personal values with that of one or both parents, feeling disconnected or removed from one’s heritage, and multiethnic identity integration.
Personal Growth
This area expands wide and far. Personal growth can mean so many different things to different people, but I’ve found the overarching theme is a deep desire to better understand themselves. From there, we look at what behaviors or thoughts support us in our growth, and which ones get in the way and keep us stagnated. It’s a matter of identifying our wants and needs that remain unmet, seeing how we’ve been trying to meet those needs, and finding ways to shift into a more supportive/productive way of going about it.