Growing Up in a World of Constant Observation When I was a teenager, I had a lot of breathing room between me and my academic mistakes. A bad report card or progress report arrived every six or so weeks. A bad grade on an otherwise good report card was hidden...

You probably give your child more love, encouragement, and intentional awareness than you yourself ever received growing up. You read the parenting books and listened to the podcasts. You watch the TED Talks and have talked to your therapist about all the ways you...

San Diego therapy for college student mental health is often reduced to what looks like “wellness-washing.” Walk around a campus during “Mental Health Awareness Week” and it feels more like marketing than medicine. Posters, hashtags, free water bottles, every slogan...

Why Your Algorithm Matters This isn’t another blog about how screen time is bad for your mental health. I’m not going to bury you in statistics or policy debates. Instead, I want to talk straight: me, a therapist, to you, a potential client, about your relationship...

In my San Diego therapy office sits a landscape painting of a misty, shadowed forest. It hangs directly over my right shoulder, so when clients look at me, it’s always there in the background. The rest of the office is much brighter. Two of my favorites are framed...

The Mummy and the Necklace of Prayers In the 1999 adventure film The Mummy, Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz share the screen with a character who becomes the villain’s lackey. Facing death, he clutches at his neck, revealing a jumble of religious pendants. Desperate,...

Therapy is where your story can be poured out—not where your therapist’s story should be performed. Here’s why the container must remain sacred.

Why I Bristle at Bad Ideas In today’s post, I want to push back on some common trauma healing myths—especially the idea that trauma is a kind of toxin ‘stored’ in the bodyAs a therapist and teacher, I live with a daily tension: letting shaky ideas pass or calling them...