About My Practice

I offer psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, consultation, and supervision in Seattle, WA. 

As an analyst, psychotherapist, supervisor or consultant my effort is to try to help others discover and face the personal truths of emotional life and interpersonal relationships while addressing the forces, often unconscious, that impede its wholesome expression. 

Training

My preparation for professional practice includes a Master’s degree in Social Work followed by 13 years of intensive post gradute study of British Object Relations, the branch of psychoanalysis most concerned with very early relationships and their reverberations across our lives. This study includes certificatons in parent/infant psychotherapy; Listening Mothers leadership; infant observation; and psychoanalytic psychotherapy (at the Center for Object Relations/ COR) and training and qualification as a psychoanalyst (from Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society).

I began working in the field in 1988, offering counselling and education to people whose lives involve adoption (at Children’s Home Society of Washington). Consistent with this focus on infancy, I also worked for nearly two decades as a doula, and was a doula trainer (for Seattle Midwifery School). I believe this deep understanding of birthing processes and early life has helped me to cultivate capacities for accompanying others through the often painful process of psychic development.

Approach

The thread running through my education and experience is the realization that how we were born, and how we were babies and young children-- what happened and what we made of it--matters a great deal. Not just in the distant past, but in the day to day of our contemporary lives, alive though often unseen in our relationships with ourselves and others.

Services

Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

People seek psychological help for many reasons. Some are transient and respond quickly to various forms of intervention, while others persist; recurrent problems that mystify and cause distress. The aim of psychoanalytically informed treatment is to make sense of troubling symptoms and to facilitate desired change.

Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis is the most intensive form of talk therapy.  Frequent contact (4 or 5 meetings a week) between analyst and patient offers a means to explore unconscious conflicts of feeling,  love and hate, loss and death, birth and sexuality in order to relieve persistant recurrant problems that mystify and cause suffering over prolonged periods.

Clinical consultation and supervision

Learning to work deeply, and going on working well depends on access to the minds of others. To this end, I offer group and individual clinical consultation and supervision for others in the field wanting to cultivate an understanding of British Object Relations theory and deepen their work.  I am an approved supervisor for clinicians seeking licensure in Washington state.

Professional Affiliations

I am an analyst member of The Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society, where I am chair of  Outreach and Scientific Meetings, member of the Education and Publication Committees, and serve on the faculty. I am a fellow of the International Psychoanalytical Association, and a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association. I am also a member of the Washington State Society for Clinical Social Work.