About Me
Throughout my long career as a massage therapist, I made contact with all kinds of human suffering, as well as human resilience. I cared for clients enduring physical pain, emotional strife, epic life changes, and all kinds of loss. I cared for clients celebrating growth, reconnecting with their wholeness, pursuing well-being, embodying evolution. I love the human body, but what I learned most of all through my bodywork career was that
I love the human experience.
I have found the same awe, the same well of curiosity and empathy in my work as a humanitarian. Whether working with forcibly displaced people in Greece or Kenya, with orphaned children in Tanzania, or with asylum seekers, refugees, and survivors of torture here in the United States, I have borne witness to such awfulness in the world. And I have witnessed that which is most extraordinary : I am floored by the capacity of my fellow human beings to not just live through but to grow through experiences of trauma and suffering. I find beauty in our ability to laugh despite pain, to love despite heartbreak, or simply to keep living, despite adversity. Integrating my career history into my work as a therapsit enhances my capacity to be truly compassionate and non-judgmental with my clients.
I also have benefited endlessly from my own longtime and ongoing work in therapy. It’s been a gift in my life, and it’s my absolute privilege to pay that forward.
On purpose
I provide holistic, somatic & relationship-based therapeutic support to individuals pursuing wholeness and healing.
On privilege
I am a person of sociopolitical privilege– as a white, cis, US-born, able-bodied, middle-class individual. As a trained social worker, I’m basically hard-wired to see through an ecological lens— which considers the individual, environmental, socio-political, & historical factors affecting our personal and collective human experience. I’m always glad to discuss these impossibly big topics, as they feel salient.
On values
Most of all, I believe we get to do our best healing work in the context of close connection and shared humanity, which is what I center in the work I do.
I am a big believer in the decolonization of concepts of “mental health” and approaches to mental health therapy.
Core values informing who I am and how I practice include holism, curiosity, authenticity, humor, and love.
I have learned most of what I know from the brave, complicated, wonderful clients I’ve had in my career, through therapy, bodywork and social work.
I have also had life-changing teachers, from my own beloved therapist, and couples therapists, to to the different healers I’ve worked with throughout my life.
Training & Experience
Master’s Degree in Clinical Social Work with a Specialization in Global Practice; Boston College, 2022
Certificate in Sensorimotor Psyschotherapy for Trauma; SPI, 2023
Training in Psychotherapeutic Touch; Fluence Training, 2024
Certificate in Polyvagal Informed Therapy; Deb Dana, 2024
Certificates in Trauma & Community Resilience Models; Trauma Resource Institute, 2012 & 2013
Training in Psychedelic Integration and Psychedelic Therapy through Psychedelic Support and Fluence, ongoing