Frequently Asked Questions

I see clients in person in Los Angeles, both in Echo Park and in Pasadena. I also work virtually with clients all over California.

My hours are Monday through Friday and subject to current availability. Please let me know about your specific scheduling needs when you book our consult call so that I can see if our calendars align.

As long as you are in California, you can call in from wherever you feel most comfortable and makes sense for you. While I believe that there are major pros and cons to both in-person and virtual therapy, one of the best things about working with a therapist online is that you don’t have to account for things like commute time or parking. The format is inherently flexible and often works better for busy people with little wiggle room, not to mention folks in parts of the state with fewer providers. 

My biggest concern in terms of your location is that you feel safe and out of the earshot of others. While I can ensure confidentiality on my end, when we are not meeting in the same room I don’t have control over what is happening on your end. Whether at home, in a private room at work, in your (parked) car, or somewhere outside, the most important thing is that you feel able to speak freely.

My fee is $200 per 50-minute individual therapy session. I have limited sliding scale slots in my caseload, so please feel free to inquire about availability for those. If I am not able to accommodate your needs at this time, I would be happy to offer referrals to other clinicians and organizations. I also do see couples and families, but exclusively for 90-minute sessions at the rate of $275/session (more on that below).

I do not directly accept insurance and am considered an out of network provider. I am happy to provide you with superbills for our sessions that you can submit to your insurance carrier for direct reimbursement. If you would like to pursue that option, I highly recommend getting in touch with your insurance ahead of our first session to ask them about your benefits for seeing an out of network clinician. 

I get that it’s frustrating to find a therapist that seems potentially like a great fit, only to learn that they don’t take your insurance. You’re either working hard at a job or paying a ton yourself for that coverage, so it makes sense that you want to use it. My choice not to work directly with insurance companies comes mainly down to this: I don’t want someone that does not have clinical mental health training and (even more importantly) DOES NOT KNOW YOU deciding whether or not you should be receiving services. When your insurance is covering your mental healthcare directly, they determine whether or not you “meet eligibility” for that care. Opting out of working directly with insurance carriers also allows me to maintain a higher level of confidentiality, because when your insurance pays for your therapy, they have the right to request access to your files and the progress notes I write to document our sessions. If at any moment they decide that you are “not mentally ill enough” to meet their standards, they could revoke their financial support regardless of how you feel about where you are in your treatment. That dynamic does not align with my values, because I believe that you should be the only person with authority to determine the necessity and duration of your care.

You must cancel or reschedule our session at least 24 hours in advance to avoid being charged my full fee for your appointment.

Before getting started, I require a free 15-minute consultation call, which you can schedule here. This is an opportunity for us to touch base and see how the initial vibe feels. I’ll want to hear a bit about why you’re seeking therapy, and you can ask me to elaborate about anything you’ve read here or ask me any other questions you might have. We will also discuss scheduling and logistics.

If you would like to reach out with any questions before getting that call on the books, feel free to shoot me an email first.

I see mostly adults in my practice now, but have extensive experience and love working with tweens and teens (11+, and their families when appropriate) as well. I work with clients of all gender identities and my practice is LGBTQIA+ affirming.

I do! And because I practice so relationally and think so systemically, I am a big believer in the benefits of working with more than one person on their dynamic together. In my previous work with couples and families, I have found that a 50-minute session just doesn’t cut it. 90 minutes allows more space to engage on a deeper level with more than one perspective, and often can lend itself to everyone in the room feeling more heard than 50 minutes can accommodate. For intimate partnerships, my practice is affirming of nontraditional relationship structures (such as ethical nonmonogamy and polyamory) and kink dynamics.

The short answer is: not if I don’t have to. My preference is to work from a non-pathologizing place, viewing your presenting concerns as challenging variants of the human experience rather than as “symptoms” of an “illness” to fix. That’s not to say that we won’t be working to help you change things that are not serving you, but we can do that without labeling them or you if that does not feel good for you. I do believe in the benefits of diagnosing, including self-diagnosing, for things like building community and sharing resources. If a helpful diagnosis (or diagnoses) have been a part of your lived experience, that is wonderful and we can absolutely weave that into our work together. Unfortunately, however, many people experience misdiagnosis or diagnosis-based stigma that has been very painful, and I do not want to perpetuate that harm.

The main time that I would assign you a diagnosis is if you are hoping to superbill your insurance for reimbursement. In that case, I do need to provide a specific diagnostic code for which you are seeking services. In this situation, you and I would collaborate together to identify something that feels true to your experience and that you feel comfortable putting on those forms, based on your presenting concerns and criteria from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). Please note that I cannot legally assign you something that is not actually a presenting issue for you. And if you are seeking assessment for a formal diagnosis (such as for learning accommodations) or interested in working with a psychiatrist on potentially trying psychotropic medication, I would be happy to help you with referrals for those services.

I want clients to know that there is no “right” way to be in therapy. You don’t have to make sure to have a plan for what you want to talk about or to “have enough to talk about” each session. I believe that what is important to bring into session will emerge organically if you trust the process. Sometimes the deepest and most “productive” sessions ARE those when you think you had nothing to say before you sat down to talk with me. If you have things you want to work on and to work though, the absolute best thing you can do is just show up consistently and see where that takes you.

I also think it’s important to know that sometimes therapy makes things feel worse before they feel better. I like to think about it like resetting a broken bone. Sometimes what’s broken starts to heal in a way that’s actually causing pain. You have adjusted and adapted in the ways you knew how, but now those things you’ve been doing are no longer serving you. Therapy can often feel like that orthopedist that has to go in and rebreak that bone in order to reset it into a position that will stop causing you pain. And that sucks! It hurts! But after the healing, that result is a limb that no longer hurts as much as it used to.

I recommend that all clients start off with weekly sessions. This allows us to grow rapport and trust, to get into a rhythm, and to build momentum around the work that you are trying to do. One way that I like to think of creating change in therapy is to picture it like deciding to take a new path through the woods. The one you’ve been walking (and for whatever reason is no longer serving you) is clear, but the new one has all kinds of branches and brush blocking the way. You have to keep walking over the new path, clearing the way while you let the old one grow over, repeatedly in order for the new one to start standing out more than the old one does. If you’re only walking over the new path every so often, it’s going to take a whole lot longer to stop walking the old path. 

In other words, if we’re only meeting bi-monthly or monthly, often that turns into a situation where you’re basically just showing up to fill me in on your life. While I do absolutely care about what’s going on for you, that leaves little room for actually processing and reflecting on your goals and the things you might be trying to do differently. After a while, we could make the decision to start tapering down to meeting less frequently, but if so we will make that choice collaboratively and in service of the work. Another reason that I discourage bi-monthly sessions early on in the process is that it can make scheduling really tricky. What happens if you need to miss a week or if I do? Do we meet the following week and throw off our rhythm? Do we skip it and wait a whole month between sessions? It gets messy quickly, and I can’t keep a window open for you if you’re not using it. If you have a weekly timeslot in my calendar, I can be much more flexible about skipping a week here and there. 

I have also had situations when a client and I determined together that meeting twice weekly was best for their needs and acuity, at least for a while. I am happy to discuss this with you during our consult call if you think you may need more than weekly support.

It really depends on you and your needs. Sometimes people come to therapy for something very specific and present like a big decision they are trying to make or to recover in the aftermath of an intense experience. Other times, clients come to me because they want to do deeper work that requires time, consistency, and patience to practice thinking about and doing things in brand new ways. We will continuously check in about this and ultimately decide together when you feel ready to pause or end our work, knowing that you may never feel entirely “done” with therapy because you will always be changing and growing with or without meeting with me on a regular basis. I am also always open to resuming work with past clients, whether for weekly sessions or on a less frequent basis as needed.

Sorry, probably not. I might give you suggestions, but mostly I will collaborate with you around coming up with experiments for things you might like to try. As much as I love a good advice column or podcast, honestly… those mostly exist for entertainment. They can absolutely impart helpful wisdom, but advice doesn’t really account for the fact that at the end of the day, it’s your life and you’re the one with all of the knowledge about the nuances of what you are and aren’t interested in trying.

Yes! Please nourish yourself. I tend to have at least one beverage with me when we meet. I love to sip tea while you spill yours! Genuinely though, I listen and think better when I’m well resourced. I want you to feel as focused and supported as possible too. Some of my clients schedule their sessions during their lunch break at work, others just often haven’t had a moment to slow down in their days until our appointment time. As long as whatever you have with you is more grounding than it is distracting, I’m all here for it. 

And as a bonus for my clients with food anxiety, it can be therapeutic to practice eating in front of someone else. I’m happy to help you get more comfortable with this, especially since it was a big part of my job when I worked in eating disorder treatment. I believe that food is meant to be joyful and connective, so I’m more than down to help you work through some of the feelings that come up and make eating with others more complicated for you.

Actually, yeah. My style is humanistic, in the sense that I show up as a full-fledged person with my own intersectional identity, beliefs, values, perspectives, and lived experience, just like you do. I will speak openly about myself as long as it feels in service of you and your treatment. I’m not going to just go on and wax poetic about myself, since I imagine that would be a frustrating experience and probably feel like a waste of your time and money, but I also won’t put up a wall just for the sake of creating distance and upholding a power structure. I am very practiced at setting boundaries in the therapeutic setting, and if you ask me something that I don’t feel would be appropriate or helpful to answer, I’ll just let you know that.