FAQ

Marriage and Family Therapists are psychotherapists and healing arts practitioners licensed by the State of California. All Marriage and Family Therapists hold either Masters or Doctoral degrees, within the fields of counseling and psychology, from state board accredited universities and are required to complete a minimum of 3000 hours of counseling experience before becoming eligible for licensure. Marriage and Family Therapists (MFTs) are core mental health practitioners and relationship specialists trained to assess, diagnose, and treat individuals, couples, families, and groups to achieve more fulfilling and productive personal, marital, familial, and social relationships. An MFT will assist you in working out solutions according to your own personal values and lifestyle. Seeking professional support is a sign of courage and a willingness to deal with life’s many changes.

Each session lasts 50 minutes. Therapy can be both short- and long-term, ranging from one or two sessions to many months, depending on the complexity of the issues presented, your personal goals, and your ability to apply the skills learned in each session to your everyday life.  Clients often come back for tune-ups once they have successfully completed their goals.

Therapy is a scientifically proven process that teaches you how your mind works. It helps you navigate your feelings, build better behaviors, and relate to your thoughts differently so you can live the life you want. Therapists who use clinically-proven evidence based techniques like work with you to set goals, track progress, and measure results. They teach you skills to build emotional resilience so you can eventually leave therapy and manage on your own. Therapy is a high-value investment in yourself.

The effectiveness of therapy relies not on the type of therapy utilized, but rather on how various therapies are applied with each client and the goals the client would like to obtain.

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy – CBT posits that our thoughts are quite powerful and subsequently cause our feelings and behaviors. CBT also assumes that we all hold illogical, negative thoughts that keep us from feeling good. Often times these thoughts are created in early childhood, and so they’re repeated over time and have become so automatic that we often aren’t aware that we have them. Engaging in CBT provides you with an opportunity to objectively examine your cognitions and learn tools to modify your thought patterns, so that dysfunctional emotions and behaviors get eliminated. This type of therapy provides a useful system for evaluation and resolving problems that are the result of our mistaken beliefs and patterns of thought. CBT is active, structured, and short-term and expects that clients engage in homework exercises to more readily incorporate these skills learned in therapy into their everyday life. CBT is highly effective for those clients suffering from depression, anxiety, relationship problems, phobias, food issues, feelings of rejection, fear of failure, and addiction issues.

Somatic Therapies – These therapies are an integration of principles derived from mindfulness training, bioenergetics and Somatic Experiencing®. Untreated stress, tension and trauma eventually somaticizes and creates chronic, physical ailments and conditions. Somatic therapies strive to safely release the tension and trauma held in the physical body. By working with the body, both through awareness and gentle, healing touch, clients are able to access the root of emotional pain more readily and subsequently heal emotional wounding more deeply than through traditional talk therapy.  The goals of somatic therapies are to help clients integrate new insights and release old, painful patterns on a deeper, subconscious and physiological level. When this release happens clients feel more alive, are happier and experience less physical pain overall.

Humanistic Therapy – This therapy emphasizes the uniqueness and inherent ability of each of us to achieve greatness. It focuses on current behaviors and encourages individuals to take responsibility for their own thoughts, feelings, and actions. The goals of humanistic therapies are to increase personal awareness, to increase sense of personal responsibility for one’s actions and destiny, and to help clients live in the moment and become more present in their daily life. Humanistic therapies are woven into all sessions with clients as their tools are necessary for a caring and respectful relationship between client and therapist.

Psychodynamic Therapy – Psychodynamic therapy strives to heighten your level of self-awareness for improved emotional health. It uses the basic assumption that everyone stores in his or her subconscious mind thoughts and feelings that are often too painful to be faced. Thus we come up with defenses, such as denial, to protect us from knowing about these painful feelings. Psychodynamic therapy helps people to acknowledge and process the difficult feelings that often cause them to engage in unhealthy and detrimental patterns of relating to themselves and others. The goal of this therapy is to provide clients with a level of acceptance as well as a clearing for the future to ensure healthier and more fulfilling life choices.

My San Diego office is located in Hillcrest. The office is in a lovely old craftsman style cottage
3821 Front Street
San Diego, CA 92103

Office in Santa Monica:
2444 Wilshire Blv #511
Santa Monica, CA 90403

Please contact me about my current fee. I do offer sliding-scale appointments based on income and ability to pay. If you need a reduced fee, I encourage you to let me know. If I cannot accommodate your financial situation, I will do my best to aid you in finding appropriate referrals.

Currently, I do not accept insurance.