Supportive depth-oriented coaching to achieve lasting, meaningful change.
”I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
Carl Gustav Jung
Informed by an interpersonal and Jungian analytical style of co-inquiry, I offer supportive coaching to help my clients uncover the insight and clarity needed to move forward with their lives and find realistic solutions to current problems and challenges.
I work with people from a wide range of cultural, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds and respectfully embrace diverse gender and sexual orientations. My clients’ ages range across the lifespan, from late teens to nonagenarians. In my earlier professional roles as a counselor and college professor, I gained valuable expertise with young adults and college students.
Our work might involve making sense of experiences with your family of origin or other unresolved aspects of your formative years to support an independent perspective while maintaining significant relationships. Other clients in mid-life may find themselves at a crossroads, wondering whether or how to embark on a new phase in life such as a career change or relocation. You may wish to develop new strategies that result in more mindful and fulfilling interpersonal interactions.
Some of my clients have grappled with the death of a loved one – sometimes by traumatic means. Losses may have occurred recently or long back. Many of us have had a difficult or painful childhood and seek supportive coaching to come to terms with and move past experiences of abuse or neglect that can feel crippling but from which it is possible to be set free. In line with my own personal history, I also work with clients who were raised in families of recent immigrants, some of whom have suffered tremendously due to adverse political conditions or war. Now there is the hard work of adjusting to a new language and culture and affirming one’s identity. Some clients seek coaching to facilitate mindful coping with chronic pain or illness. Still others may find life in our fast-changing world, or the aging process, to be enormously challenging.
I help my clients to move past the psychic barriers that life events have created, with the goal of rekindling hope and a sense of purpose, determination, and freedom.
Born in New York, where my family had settled as recent immigrants, I grew up in Los Angeles. I have lived on the East Coast, in the American South, and in Europe. I hold a Ph.D. in clinical psychology with an emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute; an M.A. in applied linguistics and TESOL from California State University, Los Angeles; and a B.A. in cultural anthropology from the University of California at Santa Barbara. I was a candidate in the graduate program for visual anthropology at Temple University in Philadelphia, where I studied videography and became actively engaged in social justice-driven documentary film- and video-making.
My professional background includes work as a teacher and professor, public health administrator, writer and editor, social justice activist, and much dabbling in the visual arts. In fact, I began my lifelong journey as a mentor on being chosen as a peer tutor in grade school at the tender age of 11. While in college, this experience informed my choice to work with teens and young adults with autism and schizophrenia. Later I taught English-as-a-Second Language, specializing in academic research and writing, both abroad and in the U.S. Now I reside amid the glory of the redwood forest along the coast in Northern Humboldt County, California.
With training in psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychology and Jungian analysis, I approach my work as a mentor and coach from a place of curiosity and care, acknowledging the importance of every aspect of my clients’ life experience and the necessity of providing individually tailored coaching and support.
Some concepts underlying my coaching and mentoring practice…
…you have the capacity to change.
Although ways of thinking, perceiving, and responding to the world can be deeply ingrained – habits that no longer serve can be difficult to shift; old wounds have become hardened scars – I believe that with intention and nonjudgmental support, you can reinvigorate your life path and move toward transformation.
Carl G. Jung called this approach to broadening the psyche “individuation.”
…the surfaces have depths.
A Jungian-based approached to self-discovery probes beneath the exterior that has long helped you to manage the demands of daily life. We will address deeply held or unconscious beliefs and emotional patterns. These patterns can inhibit growth and steer the course of many of life's dimensions in unwanted ways, outside of your awareness. There is the sense that life and relationships could be even richer and more meaningful. In doing deep interior work, you may not only begin to heal unconscious psychic wounds and change unhelpful habits and patterns, you may also delight in discovering the possibilities for living your unique life to its fullest.
…neither your past nor your problems define you.
While you may have had experiences that cause lingering pain, these effects are not insurmountable. Mining the depths can help you to understand both how life’s challenges have shaped you, alongside how you relate to other people and react to situations in the present. This work can be ongoing, a commitment, and can help you to recognize how prior adversities can be meaningfully integrated and accepted as part of your multi-faceted character. The integration and reconciliation of past and present facilitates a process of emotional maturation and the emergence of a sense of wholeness.
…everything is connected.
Jung developed the concept of the collective unconscious, or a transpersonal realm, in which archetypal events and experiences connect everyone. This means that human beings share many of the same kinds of fundamental experiences, universally. It also means that the body and mind are connected. In doing deep interior work, it is possible to explore your dreams, fantasies, feelings, and bodily or physical experiences in the context of your sense of being a part of a broader existence. It also suggests that all beings coexist as part of a larger natural world.
…relationship matters.
Approaching coaching from the depths fosters the emergence of an atmosphere of trust in which deeply personal and sensitive material can be safely explored. Emphasis is placed on building an honest dialogue and an alliance between analyst and analysand.
…creativity is life-affirming.
Recognizing untapped creative potential in yourself can be paramount to moving forward with a reinvigorated perspective on life. Each person has a unique imagination and the capacity for some form of creativity, which can take many forms.
…diversity matters.
The human family is vast. I value mutual regard, inclusion, respectful dialogue, and humility.