The first session is a chance for you to become acquainted with me and I to become acquainted with you. Together we’ll also discuss your hopes for therapy, some of your history, and logistical items like paperwork and scheduling.

A standard session is 50 minutes long for individual clients and 60 minutes for couples. However, some clients find that 75- or 90-minute sessions better fit their specific needs.

The session fee ranges between $150-200, dependent on session length. To discuss the best session length to meet your particular needs, please call me (626-818-7599).

Yes, for specific circumstances, I offer a limited number of sliding scale appointments. If you would like to discuss the sliding scale further, please call me (626-818-7599).

Insurance coverage and reimbursement are specific to your unique policy and varies by carrier. I would be happy to speak to you about your specific circumstances and insurance coverage.

I accept payment in cash, check or credit card (including mobile payments).

To schedule an appointment, call (626-818-7599), email ([email protected]) or complete the contact form.

My office is located in the Livery Building at 101 East Green Street in Pasadena. If you would like driving directions from your home or office, please use this link.

As you may notice from the map, the Livery Building is set back from the street and is best reached by a short walk down the alleyway, named Big Bang Theory Way, located halfway between Raymond Avenue and Arroyo Parkway. My office building shares an entrance gate with Dog Haus restaurant and as such, is access controlled. At your appointment time, please call me at (626) 818-7599, and I will meet you at the front door.

There are several parking options in the area, but I would specifically recommend the Schoolhouse Parking Facility in Old Pasadena, which offers 90 minutes of complementary parking and is located just a ½ block from my office. There is also metered street parking on Green Street and the surrounding streets, if you prefer.

The Livery Building is a white brick building and is set back from the street. It is best reached by a short walk down the alleyway – named Big Bang Theory Way – located halfway between Raymond Avenue and Arroyo Parkway. My office building shares an entrance gate with Dog Haus restaurant and as such, is access controlled. At your appointment time, please call me at (626) 818-7599, and I will meet you at the front door.

From the time we are born, we all seek to connect with others and grow, and our most significant experiences of personal growth and connection are embedded in and elicit emotion. Emotion is our body’s hard-wired, first-response survival system that points us to what’s important, facilitates learning & meaning-making, and catalyzes intimacy & bonding. Positive emotions – like joy, delight, surprise, curiosity, or love – tell us when we’re experiencing something that moves us toward what helps us survive and thrive. And experiences that threaten these two important goals can stir pain, fear, sadness, grief, or shame. Intense negative emotional experiences are part of being human. With the right social support, however, we can learn from them, they can become integrated into our larger story, and with their help we can better connect to the parts of ourselves that are strong and resilient. But, if we don’t get help with them, are scolded for having big emotions, or see them overwhelm those closest to us, we can find ourselves confused and struggling to cope. Our social connections are so important to our survival that faced with the dilemma between expressing an emotion that we might need help with or maintaining an important relationship, we most often chose the relationship. Cut-off from the freedom to express emotion and receive the support we need, we find ourselves contending with difficult emotional experiences all alone. Alone, we can develop protective ways of managing these difficult experiences that help us feel less stuck, overwhelmed, or vulnerable in the moment. However, these strategies often move us further away from our goals of connection and growth.

AEDP (or Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy) is a model of individual therapy that integrates what we’ve learned from the last 100 years of research about the building blocks of human connection, emotion, and the relationship between the two. In AEDP, we – my clients and I – cultivate a collaborative space safe enough to set aside protective strategies and together explore emotions and experiences that have been previously been too overwhelming to bear. Together, we look at these difficult experiences & emotions and discover the adaptive resources within them and connect more deeply with the internal strength & resilience that was there the whole time. Said simply, as an AEDP-trained therapist I help clients undo their aloneness in the face of difficult experiences, strengthen the places that feel broken inside, and help them discover where they’ve been strong all along.

It is a long-held cultural belief that it is okay for children to need the help of others to meet their emotional and relational needs. But healthy adults are to be self-sufficient and should not have strong emotions related to our need for closeness with our loved ones. However, we now know from research that the opposite is true. We humans are social beings who never outgrow our need for connection to those closest to us. And often, what lies at the heart of difficult moments of conflict in romantic relationships is the threat of emotional disconnection.

Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) is an empirically-validated model of couples’ therapy that developed alongside the growing science of adult attachment and bonding. Through this structured approach, I help couples slow-down and unpack difficult moments in their relationship to understand the emotional and relational needs at the heart of conflict. Then, together we craft new ways of talking about these moments that increase intimacy and closeness and begin to heal past wounds.