Experiential individual, couples and group therapy toward inner freedom and fuller contact with your life
In-person in Atwater Village, Los Angeles
Understanding yourself is not the same as experiencing yourself differently
Are you...
~ the person who has been told, for as long as you can remember, that you feel too much? →
~ the achiever who vanished somewhere inside your own success? →
~ the artist who can create beauty, but no longer feels it? →
~ the partner who feels lonelier inside the relationship than outside it? →
~ the one who mastered blending in, and longs to be seen? →
~ the therapist who holds everyone, and has nowhere to set it down? →
Many people come to me after years of insight. They know where their patterns began and can name them as they happen. Yet something in how they live, love or work stays the same.
Others have had therapy that went well on paper. They learned to manage their anger, regulate their anxiety and hold better boundaries, and they function better than before. And still they sense there's more: feeling, aliveness, a fuller self than a well-managed life has room for.
Healing, as I understand it, is becoming increasingly able to be yourself. That includes what was dismissed, shrunk, or never had enough space to come forward: the sense that something is wrong before you can say why, a want you can't yet justify, an idea of yourself that no longer fits.
When you can let in what you're experiencing, you have yourself to bring to another person. You can notice what you want while it's happening, say what hurt before you explain it away, and let someone matter to you without losing track of yourself. Relationships change when you're actually in them.
What can change
What saves you at one stage of life can begin to suffocate you at another. Over time, you become more flexible where you've had to be rigid. The unspoken rules you've lived by lose some of their authority. You hold beliefs about yourself more loosely, and check them against what you actually experience. Gradually you become less a fixed thing to manage, and more a process you're living.
You might begin to hear that a voice you took as your own, the one that says "I have to," "I'm bad" or "Give up," carries an echo of someone else's. You might feel anger without immediately prosecuting yourself for it, receive care without deflecting it, say no and stay in contact, or start to know what you need and ask for it without apologizing. Change is rarely tidy. There can be grief along the way, and surprise, play and relief. I'm interested in the life that grows out of your own sense of things, wherever it leads.
Meet Jimmy
For fifteen years I worked in advertising, music and fashion in London and Los Angeles, doing well optically but trapped inside. My own therapy began when I was fed up with wearing a mask. I was depressed, swinging between shrinking and inflating myself, living inside an identity I had outgrown, and keeping much of what I felt out of my own awareness.
These days I feel things nearer the moment they happen, and they move through me more freely. I'm kinder to myself, which includes letting myself be uncertain, different, even disobedient. I shrink myself less, and I look for creative ways to meet my needs instead of dismissing them. I still go to individual and group therapy, and I know how much depends on the person across from you. Being a client is also what led me to Carl Rogers and Eugene Gendlin, the two thinkers my practice grows from.
What excites me most is the moment someone stops describing their life and starts speaking from inside it. A word lands, the breath changes, and something held for years begins to move. It can't be forced, which is part of why I love it. I try to sense what it's like to be you, as if from the inside, while staying myself. If I get you wrong, I want to hear, "No, that isn't it."
Today I'm a Registered Associate Marriage and Family Therapist (AMFT #156012), supervised by Angela Gee, LMFT #51031.
Ways to work together
We stay close to what you're experiencing, including what has no words yet, until something truer to you emerges.
You experience how you are with other people as it happens, find words for it, and try something new while they're right there with you.
What you find with me can be lived with others, and what happens in group has somewhere to go with me.
We go back into the moments where you lose each other, so each of you can find what's underneath and be heard.
Who I specialize in working with
Gifted and highly sensitive adults often feel and think at an intensity others find hard to be around, and learn to turn themselves down to stay connected. Over-functioners are the capable ones everyone relies on, who keep things running and lose track of what they need. Their work and relationships often reward exactly the habits that are wearing them down. Therapists often make room for everyone's needs except their own. What they share is a self that has become very good at managing, and a person underneath who wants to be met.
Also on TikTok
I also make short videos about therapy on TikTok. If watching a therapist on TikTok stirs something in you, whether that's interest, skepticism or an eye-roll, that's welcome when we meet too.
Contact
PHONE
ADDRESS
3405 Glendale Blvd, Atwater Village, Los Angeles, CA 90039