How I work

Three stages of one walk.

Three principles run through every hour I spend with someone. They are not techniques and they are not steps to complete. They are the way we walk — and they were mine before they were part of my work.

Stage one · the fog lifts

Learning to be present.

Being in the present is the mental state of being engaged in the now without emotionally reacting to our thoughts. An important component of well-being is to be authentically in touch with our emotions — even the uncomfortable, painful ones.

The ability to let yourself truly feel your feelings is the key to joy. It allows you to embrace all of life instead of just resisting pain. In the room, this looks like slowing down enough to notice what is actually happening in you, before deciding what to do about it.

Stage two · the path

Creating meaning and purpose.

Have you ever felt like you are just going through the motions of your day, not fully engaged in your life? Identifying our deepest values — what is genuinely important to us — helps us step out of automatic pilot.

From there we can create more meaningful moments, even if that means tolerating some discomfort along the way. This is not about a grand purpose. It is about knowing which direction is yours, and taking one step in it this week.

Stage three · the ground

Developing a mind-body connection.

Your beliefs, emotions, memories, and habits all influence your mental and physical health. Physical health and mental health are often treated as separate; they are interconnected — one affects the other.

Awareness of the mind-body connection can improve quality of life for healthy, active people as well as for those living with long-term or life-threatening illness. Healing and preventing disease asks for a combination of physical, spiritual, and emotional approaches — this is the ground my training as a health psychologist stands on.

What a first session is like

Fifty minutes, your order of events.

Before that, a fifteen-minute call: what brings you, whether I am a fit, what a session costs, how telehealth or the office works. If we go ahead, the first session is yours to shape. Most people start with the story; some start with the body — the sleep, the tightness, the thing that happens at 3 a.m. Either is right.

What I will and won't do

I will be direct. If I think something, I say it, kindly.
I will not rush you toward a diagnosis or a plan in the first hour.
I will use evidence-based approaches, and I will tell you which one we are using and why, if you ask.
I will not promise outcomes. I will promise attention, honesty, and my full training.
I will hold what you say within the limits of confidentiality I explain at the start.
I will work in Spanish, English, or both — your choice, sentence by sentence.

The approaches behind the principles

Seven methods, one companion.

Emotion-focused therapy, mindfulness, insight-oriented work, CBT, ACT, humanistic therapy, and legacy therapy — each described in a sentence on the about page. Or see who I work with.