HEAL
RELATIONSHIPS & EMOTIONS
Heal from relational and emotional pain. Reduce Stress and anxiety. Face life's hurdles with grace and dignity. Cultivate nurturing relationships and emotional closeness. Fill your life with vibrancy and meaning.
As humans, we universally encounter moments of doubt, uncertainty, and emotional turmoil. Gain tools and knowledge to navigate feelings and make decisions. Cultivate the experience of self-compassion and find a sense of inner belonging. As you practice self-welcoming in awareness, connect with your own power and the source of your capacity to both give and receive love.
Adults, Teens, Couples, Families, Groups
Drawing on a blend of life experiences and warmth from Europe and Asia, in-depth psychology training in Santa Barbara, wisdom gleaned from teaching graduate students in psychotherapy and guiding therapist-in-training in California, and the profound experiences of fatherhood.
3 Steps:
“1. Schedule a Free Consult”
“2. Assess for Fit”
“3. Heal and Thrive”
Welcoming Self
Therapy is about welcoming Self. With every client I have worked with thus far, we end up discovering that Self, at the core, includes love. When a new client comes to therapy (and that applied to me as well when I started therapy as a client), they either have the notion, implicitly or explicitly, that something inside should not be approached too closely, or is bad. In my practice, none of these perceived qualities of Self end up being true. But we carry those beliefs because along the way, we received messages, sometimes directly, often times implicitly, that something about ourselves may be defective (I am thinking of abuse and neglect, but also of environments which, while materially caring, lack emotional acknowledgment).
Welcoming Self has two “components:” developing awareness of Self (a) and forming a warm relationship with Self (b). I believe that awareness of Self and the quality of relationship with Self are deeply interwoven. To be anchored, a warm relationship with Self needs to be done in understanding of Self. Else, there may be doubt: am I really embracing Self, or am I only embracing the parts that I see, leaving off the parts of Self that I implicitly deem as unacceptable? (If so, then I don’t really welcome Self.) And developing awareness of Self needs the support of a warm relationship with it. Else, why would I want to consider looking at those parts of Self which I do not accept (yet)?
What I notice is that we still experience external stresses when we get to welcome our Self (presumably because of our cognitive abilities, our sentientness, and our mortality). But these are dampened by the foundation that a warm internal relationship with Self provides. We no longer have to deal with the internal stress of feeling inadequate. The capacities for vibrancy, courage, risk assessment, empathy, and meaning become freed. We get to feel at home inside.
“I am a psychotherapist licensed in the state of California (LMFT114054). I help individuals, families, teams, and organizations with emotions, relationships, self-worth, and culture. I work with North American and European/foreign nationals. I also taught the practice of psychotherapy to graduate students and am now supervise psychotherapists in training.
I was raised in Paris and spent my summers in Brittany. I remember enjoying math and physics growing up. As a result, I studied engineering. I also studied business administration and got an M.S. in Engineering and an MBA, having studied at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, HEC Paris, ESADE (Spain), Arts et Métiers ParisTech, and Denmark Technical University. I worked at Verizon, Cap Gemini, and founded 2 startups.
The birth of my two children has been the most meaningful event in my life. When my daughter was born I remember asking myself about how to bring meaning in my professional life. I had enjoyed my corporate work but felt that something was missing. At that time I briefly contemplated becoming a psychotherapist. I had received therapy in my late teens and had found that encounter profoundly meaningful, but implicitly ruled this career out (in retrospect rightfully, as I believe I was not mature enough then).
Instead, I turned to the study of life from a geopolitical perspective after having read a book on diplomacy by a former U.S. Secretary of State. I took international affairs classes at the Johns Hopkins University and then studied at the University of California, Irvine the causes of war. I became interested in what was the only empirically-validated statement in the field of international relations (to my knowledge): that liberal democracies do not go to war against each other. I ended up wondering how this type of political organization comes to life and I became interested in culture, how it gets constituted, its attributes, its effects on its members and on others, and its evolution.
I had first discovered culture in my travels. It is when I left my home country for the first time that I became actually aware that culture existed, other than at an intellectual level. Prior to that, it had been so pervasive that I had no felt awareness of its existence (or power). The descriptions of culture I came across, however, did not account for the human complexity as I had experienced it in the countries I lived in. So I looked where I thought would be enough complexity: psychology and complexity theory.
What I found, in addition to answering my questions about culture, was purpose. I realized that I had actually come to psychology because I felt ready, and also because I love being a dad, because I love providing what I think all of us should receive growing up, myself included, and through life: the continued experience of being deeply listened to, appreciated, and being provided with the tools that we need to grow and shine.
My psychotherapy practice includes elements of psycho-education, psychodynamic approaches, Jungian psychology, attachment theory, emotionally focused therapy (EFT), person-centered approach, gestalt, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), EMDR, dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), and mindfulness as a function of what is called for. I am also a trained yoga nidra mindfulness meditation instructor. I completed my psychotherapist training with an emphasis in depth psychology at the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara.”