Education

My education in psychological insight, healing, and growth began when I was a child and continues to this day. It has been an honor and a privilege to help colleagues, friends, and family negotiate all sorts of psychological difficulties—anxiety and depression, alcohol addiction and abusive relationships, trauma burnout, and attachment challenges, to name a few. As a humanistic, client-centered therapist, I am not limited by orthodoxy: I will bring to our relationship whatever information, experience, tool, or technique that seems most likely to serve you in the course of our work together.

I fell in love with psychology in the 5th grade when I read my parents' copy of I'm OK—You're OK, and had the revelation that I could use transactional analysis to stop myself from pinching my sister and getting in trouble. The love affair deepened when I discovered Jung in high school, and my best friend and I devoured dark chocolate and raspberries on weekends, reading his works and marveling at the hidden mysteries of the psyche.

I enrolled at UC Berkeley on the strength of its reputation for having a world-class psychology program. Unfortunately, I learned too late that the program was focused on neuroscience and there was no Jung to be had. (I am now keenly interested in neuroscience as it relates to my clients, but it wasn't what I was looking for at the time.) I stuck around, studied political theory, molecular cell biology, and architecture, and graduated summa cum laude in 1992.

Bumming around a Berkeley bookstore after graduation, I picked up Martin Buber's I and Thou, found myself deeply excited about humanistic psychology, and—with the unfathomable instincts of a mission-seeking young adult—decided to go to law school. I received my JD from Yale in 1997.

When I retired after practicing law for 25 years, I returned to Buber and Jung and I'm OK—You're Ok. I enrolled in my local university to study psychology and learn about the latest research and developments in evidence-based approaches to various illnesses, neuropsychology, pharmapsychology, trauma treatment, and psychodynamics. I graduated Golden Gate University with high honors with an MA in Counseling Psychology, in 2024 and trained at the Western Institute For Social Research Child and Family Development Center and the Liberation Institute in San Francisco.