About the practice

I started Longwater in 2016 after a decade in hospital social work, because the people I kept meeting needed more than one therapist's calendar could hold.

Most of my work is with trauma and with new parents — two places where people arrive convinced that something is wrong with them, and leave understanding that something happened to them. I also supervise our associates and see a small number of clinicians who need their own place to put things down.

Outside of sessions I'm usually on the East Bay bike path, going slower than I mean to.

A lot of the men who end up in my office have been told their whole lives to handle it, and have been handling it, right up until they couldn't.

I work with anxiety that shows up as work, with grief that arrived years ago and never got any room, and with the flatness that follows both. My style is direct and conversational — I'll ask real questions and I'll tell you what I notice.

Before this I ran an employee assistance program, which is where I learned how much of what looks like burnout is actually grief.

Couples usually come to me in one of two states: fighting about everything, or carefully not fighting about anything. Both are workable.

I'm trained in Emotionally Focused Therapy, which in practice means we spend less time litigating who said what and more time on what happens underneath it. I also see families with a teenager in the middle of it, where the goal is usually to get everyone talking to each other rather than through me.

I see couples together, and each partner on their own when that's what the work needs.

I work with teenagers and people in their twenties, which mostly means I work with people who are being asked to decide the rest of their lives while running on four hours of sleep.

Sessions with me are not a worksheet. We talk, we figure out what's actually driving the anxiety or the shutdown, and we practise saying the hard thing out loud somewhere it's safe to get it wrong first.

I'm the person to ask for if you want a therapist who will take a fifteen-year-old seriously and still loop the parents in properly.

As an associate I'm early in my licensure and supervised weekly, which has two honest implications: my fee is the lowest in the practice, and you get two clinicians thinking about your care instead of one.

I work with anxiety, with queer and trans folks who are tired of explaining themselves, and with grief of the kind other people have stopped asking about.

I have the most openings here, usually within a week.