Common Questions

I provide cognitive behavioral therapy, which means I help clients with behavior change (e.g. facing fears, improving self-care behaviors, using coping skills, living life more fully), cognitive flexibility and new learning (identifying patterns and harmful societal messages, developing skills to challenge or disengage from unhelpful thinking), exposure, and mindfulness interventions (feeling more present in life and in the body). Therapy can also mean feeling emotions more fully, addressing perfectionism, setting boundaries, improving relationships, and working through difficulties that may at first seem unrelated to what initially brought you in. Therapy is typically weekly, especially at first.

I aim to help you become your own therapist, which means therapy can be time-limited with clear end goals. With that said, many of my clients value having an ongoing, longer-term therapy relationship, which is an important part of my practice as well. This is always a decision we make collaboratively based on your needs, preferences, and progress.

Anxiety, OCD, and eating disorders exist on a spectrum of severity, and therapy can be helpful even if you don’t feel like a label fits you perfectly. For example, some people struggle with anxiety or eating difficulties without knowing if it meets criteria for a disorder. While this information can be helpful to learn or confirm through a diagnostic intake (and it's my job to help you figure out), it’s less important than determining how therapy can help you struggle less – no matter where you start.

I value working with a wide range of clients. People of all races, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, religions, abilities, and sizes are welcome. I engage in weekly consultation and ongoing training to continually improve the care I provide, and this involves examining my own unconscious biases and those baked into Western therapy models.

I am an out-of-network provider and do not bill insurance companies directly. This means you decide whether to submit information about your mental health care to your insurance company for possible reimbursement. My fees are consistent with those of other psychologists with similar training and expertise. I provide all my clients with a monthly Superbill (the form that you need for reimbursement if you choose to pursue it) via my secure electronic portal. I encourage you to contact your insurance company to ask about out-of-network reimbursement for behavioral health care.

Though CBT is not for everyone, I sometimes hear stories from folks who have experienced poorly executed CBT, thinking CBT itself was the problem. CBT is not just a formulaic, one-size-fits-all protocol, and it shouldn't feel surface level. If it’s done well, you should never feel like you’re just thinking wrong or that the past is irrelevant. It’s important to find out if your therapist has had specific training and supervision in CBT before judging whether CBT itself could work for you, especially if it is a recommended therapy for the difficulties you’re experiencing.

CBT also functions as an umbrella term for many types of therapy that share a theoretical framework and common elements, including exposure-based therapies (the gold-standard approach for anxiety and OCD), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), to name a few. With that said, most evidence-based therapies are more similar than they are different in terms of the big picture, despite the ways we might try to compare them. It can be helpful to think about evidence-based therapies like different languages – one doesn’t have to be better or worse, but it’s important to find a language that makes sense and clicks for you.

Yes. I believe strongly in a multidisciplinary approach to care, especially when eating concerns are part of the picture. I'm glad to coordinate with any of your treatment team. I don't typically charge for time spent collaborating or consulting with your other providers.

If you don't already have other providers in place but we agree it would be helpful, I can help you find them, either through my own network or by helping you search. I've built a network of trusted colleagues over the years, including prescribers, dietitians, psychologists offering other treatment modalities, and medical doctors.