ABOUT ME

I am a licensed psychologist with 10 years of experience in the mental health field. I received my undergraduate degree from Harvard University and my doctorate from Rutgers University.  I then completed a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at the Victims of Violence Program, a specialized trauma treatment program at Cambridge Health Alliance, a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital.  I have conducted clinical work in university counseling centers, hospital inpatient and outpatient settings, and trauma treatment programs.

I am experienced in working with people from a very wide range of cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, sexual orientations, and gender identities.  I greatly enjoy my work and feel fortunate to be able to do it.

ABOUT MY APPROACH

I work from an integrative relational psychodynamic and emotion-focused framework. This means I combine an emphasis on the importance of relationships in shaping who we are and how we experience our lives with an emphasis on how we experience and relate to our emotions.

Often, and very understandably, people have come to relate to their emotions as obstacles to functioning effectively and achieving their goals.  Research has demonstrated that emotions, when experienced at a level that does not overwhelm us, function as valuable sources of information that help guide us to take appropriate courses of action and to make good decisions.  For emotions to be able to serve these vital functions, we need to learn how to identify them, how to experience them without becoming too overwhelmed to use the information they hold, and how to transform emotions that are not useful.  Many of us have not had the opportunity to learn how to relate to emotions in this way.

I believe this type of learning about emotions happens most effectively in the context of a trusting relationship, and that a good psychotherapy relationship can provide an excellent opportunity for this learning.  I help people learn how to experience the range of their emotions in adaptive ways that can be life-enhancing, rather than frightening or overwhelming.