Counseling

With two decades of counseling experience, an insistence upon a reimagining of "mental health" - often a code word for "mental illness" - has evolved within my approach to wellness. By emphasizing a non-pathologizing posture rather than psychiatric models and their clusters of symptoms, this evolution embraces the many personal, community, and system levels of our experience. The intersections of family history, work and career, culture, politics, and personal justice - among other influences, are considered with gentleness and curiosity. Together we collaborate to reimagine our experience and the wider systems we still must navigate when our session is over.

This emphasis upon gentleness and curiosity - and the acknowledging of the epidemic of diagnoses and the harms of labeling people who are simply responding to the conditions of their lives, is understood as "compassionate pragmatism."
 

I am profoundly curious about what it is like to be you. I do not race to diagnose and will typically seek consultation with at least two other licensed professionals before I do I provide a diagnosis. I will never provide a placeholder diagnosis just so an insurer will authorize a payout. I enjoy a wide referral network to guide you to a more appropriate professional. 

I do a lot of referring; twenty years in the Los Angeles helping community has cast me as something of an air traffic controller, guiding brave aircraft to optimal runways and services. In short, I believe most people are doing what they know to do to try and make sense of - or simply endure - their experience. This is often NOT mental illness. 

Bound by professional standards as a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor, and as a Licensed Advanced Alcohol and Other Drug Counselor, our 50-minute telehealth sessions rarely exceed ten sessions in total, and are supplemented by several 90-minute, in-person walking sessions along beaches, trails, parks, and bluffs.
 

I hold a special fondness for "emerging adults;" those in the 17–28-year-old age range. Drawing from my background as Director of the Center for Collegiate Recovery at a major university in California for over a decade, and in my private practice work, I have come to recognize that "recovery" is no longer limited to just alcohol and other drugs but encompasses a collaborative conspiracy of wellness beyond substance misuse, including trauma, self-injury, relationship transitions, partner violence, emotional well-being, and even environmental and social justice. 

Getting and feeling better is no longer a mystery.