My Therapeutic Lens

I'm a psychoanalyst. My training is rooted in understanding the unconscious: the parts of our inner lives that drive our behavior, shape our relationships, and repeat across our history in ways we don't always recognize. Psychoanalysis takes seriously the idea that much of what troubles us isn't fully visible to ourselves, and seeing the outlines requires deep attention on the part of the listener. Deep and open attention resists a one-size-fits-all mindset.

While insurance companies push us to see people as neat diagnostic packages and offer quick solutions that can be manualized and replicated, when someone comes to see me, my first job is not to reach for a toolkit. It's to understand this person, in this moment, with this particular history. I work with people who are grieving, anxious, angry, dealing with traumas that won’t stay locked away no matter how hard they try. These stories are all singular.

That said, there are areas where lived experience and personal interest have given me particular depth of knowledge and feeling. One is what I call the complexity of belonging: being multi-racial; growing up as a Third Culture Kid; living with the impact of immigration and cultural dislocation. I am also committed to working with journalists carrying the cumulative weight of vicarious trauma — the cost of repeatedly bearing witness to suffering, often with little support and within a professional culture that rewards stoicism.

This is my particular lens that I see through. That doesn’t mean it’s the right way, just mine. If any of this resonates for you, drop me a line.