An attuned, individualized approach to therapy.
Learn more about my approach to relational therapy to see if it could be helpful for you
I guide my clients to safely process the effects of what they’ve been through.
I work with an awareness that the people who come to my practice may have endured something stressful or traumatic within their important relationships. Experiences like this can involuntarily shape us in ways that prioritize safety and self-protection. Oftentimes, the people I meet would like to connect more with themselves and others but find that there are some protective patterns standing in the way.
“Relational therapy” refers to how the relationship between therapist and client can create safe-enough conditions for people to explore how to shift these patterns at their own pace and on their own terms. As a relational therapist, I pay close attention to, nurture, and respect each client’s sense of autonomy, agency, and self-determination. My approach is informed by evidence-based practice, but I am guided primarily by client’s individual stories and needs, rather than rigid adherence to models or protocols.
Who can benefit from relational therapy?
Oftentimes, emotions are underlying the patterns we are struggling with. Relational therapy can help people respond to feelings of hurt, grief, pain, fear, anger, heartache, loss, or shame.
A core assumption of relational therapy is that we do not need to get rid of these emotions in order to feel better, but rather, we can learn how to understand and process them in new ways.
I help people understand the ways they've learned to cope with past hurts as they gradually build new paths forward.
Some of the patterns that we can explore in relational therapy:
Shame, feeling unworthy, unlovable, or inherently bad
Inner critic, feeling ‘never good enough’
Anxiety, feeling vigilant, persistently afraid, or filled with dread
Isolation, feeling invalidated, unseen, misunderstood, lonely
Self-hatred, feelings of wanting to reject or disregard who you are
Unease, feeling as though you can’t slow down or relax
Grief, feeling a deep, enduring sense of loss
Panic, feeling physically ill or viscerally distraught from anxiety
Disconnect, feeling out of touch with yourself, your body, or your life
Relationship problems, feeling difficulty connecting or setting boundaries
Pressure, feeling like you have to be somewhere other than where you are right now
Somatization, feeling stress- or emotion-based pain or discomfort in your body
Many of our current problems began as solutions.
These patterns emerge to help us endure … to help us survive. They’re involuntary, and undeserving of blame, pathologization, or judgement.
It is possible to recover from stress, trauma, and adversity. Relational therapy is one way to support the brain’s innate capacity for healing.
I am trained in Narrative Therapy, Internal Family Systems (IFS), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Attachment Focused EMDR (AF-EMDR), the Neuro-Affective Relational Model (NARM), Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT), and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). I integrate elements of these various approaches to adapt my approach to each client.
The following practices and principles are key parts of my approach:
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When some of our important relationships have felt damaging, conflicting, scary, or unpredictable, the therapeutic relationship aims to offer the opposite. It is the anchored, safe place from which we can establish or deepen our connection with ourselves. I approach each client with a genuine sense of curiosity, compassion, and possibility—with time, my hope is for my clients to see themselves the way I see them—deeply human, valued, and worthy of ease and comfort.
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Therapy is a space for practicing inner exploration with more openness and curiosity. When we build a more open and curious relationship with ourselves, we can begin to assign new meanings to the experiences that we once met with self-blame, harsh criticism, or shame (all adaptive responses in the context of trauma). We can use our growing, curious awareness to support ourselves as we begin moving away from old patterns and toward our preferred ways of treating ourselves.
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When therapy feels safe enough (and safety takes time to build), painful emotions and memories can be processed. In my approach, to “process” does not mean retelling traumatic stories in depth or reliving specific details of traumatic memories. It is about processing the ways in which the memories show up in the here-and-now. Memories of adversity or trauma stay with us in multiple levels of our being: emotional, somatic (physical), cognitive (thinking, beliefs), and within our very identity. Recovery involves turning toward these memories in their here-and-now form, at a pace that feels tolerable, to make sense of them, contain the emotion that emerges from them, and eventually allow them to exist alongside our present-day experiences.
When appropriate, we can use EMDR to facilitate reprocessing. EMDR is a modality which helps the brain process traumatic experiences.
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Adversity, stress, and trauma do not happen in isolation from the world around us. Making sense of our personal stories often involves zooming out to acknowledge the intergenerational, societal, and/or familial factors that have played a role in shaping our experiences.
Many of my clients are LGBTQ+ people, neurodivergent folks (most often with ADHD), and/or ethnic minorities who want to process the impact of marginalization or discrimination.
As a white Western therapist in a multicultural Asian city, my approach is to be affirming of cultural identity. This means that my clients’ hopes, desires, and intentions are more important to me than Western views of individual identity, family relationships, and community. -
I believe that a core process of therapy is envisioning and establishing how you want to be in relationship with yourself. When adverse or challenging life experiences have disrupted or interrupted your right to develop a solid sense of who you are, it can be difficult to think about what you most want in life. Relational therapy provides space to get more closely acquainted with your identity and your hopes, and space to explore and process what might be getting in the way of you living as authentically and fully as you’d like.