About Me

I am a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist.

My journey toward marriage and family therapy began working with high risk foster kids while I studied psychology at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. I will always remember the tension I felt first meeting the young man I would be working with. In his file I had read a list of all the ugly things, the "risks," that were a part of his past, but when I met the young man at his door he had a smile on his face while he gave me a warm handshake. He was strong, determined, and funny. He had dreams and aspirations. Again and again during my career I have seen so many labels: Oppositional, depressed, anxious, hyperactive, violent... labels that focus on deficits. Yet each time I meet someone new it is their strengths and their uniqueness that shine through to me.

The next several years I spent working with kids through after school programs, teaching art, and working in a nonpublic school with teenagers who are on the autism spectrum. While I spent my days supporting kids in their educational and behavioral goals, I saw that the strongest barriers to some of these kids’ successes was not the schoolwork, but challenges in their relationships with their peers or family members. This led me to start looking for how I could become a therapist.

I studied marriage and family therapy at Fuller Theological Seminary’s School of Psychology. During my program I worked for a year at a small community mental health center providing therapy to a diverse group of clients. My work with teens and their parents and also men struggling with anger and violence in their relationships would stick with me after I graduated from Fuller in 2017.

I spent the year after graduating at another community mental health center where I visited kids and teens in their homes and at school. Again I worked with a diverse group of clients with a wide range of challenges and was equipped with excellent training for my work out in the field. In my pursuit of providing the best mental health care to my clients, I transitioned into private practice under the supervision of Natasha Morisawa,LMFT, where I began working primarily with men in their 20s and 30s and families.

When I’m not doing therapy, I enjoy photography, playing guitar, cooking new foods, and wandering around thrift shops.