How I work
An integrative approach to changing relationship patterns
People often ask what makes my work unique and different from other therapists. Here is the simplest way I can put it.
I help people change relationship patterns by working simultaneously with attachment, the nervous system, the family system, and the deeper generational patterns that shape our sense of belonging.
What "integrative" means in my practice
Integrative, for me, does not mean collecting techniques. It means refusing to fit you into a single model.
A relationship pattern is never just one thing. It lives in your attachment history, in your body, in your family, and in the generations that came before you. So I bring several lenses to our work at once: attachment theory, family systems, Family Constellation, somatic awareness of the nervous system, and trauma-informed care. In any given session, I follow whichever lens best serves what is happening in front of me.
Four threads run through everything I do.
1. I see the whole system
Many therapists work primarily with the individual. Couples therapists work with the couple. I work with the person, the couple, the family, and the multigenerational system around them, because a pattern rarely belongs to one person alone.
The way you love, argue, withdraw, or please did not begin with you. It was shaped in your earliest bonds, rehearsed in your family, and often inherited from people you never met. When I listen to you, I am listening for all of it: your story, your relationship, and the larger system quietly moving underneath.
2. I work underneath the behavior
When one partner pursues and the other withdraws, most approaches stop at the pattern itself. I get curious about what the pattern is protecting.
What does the pursuit mean? What does the withdrawal mean? What is each person afraid would happen if they did it differently?
Behavior is rarely the problem. It is usually a solution to a problem you cannot quite name yet, often an old fear wearing present-day clothes. When we find what a behavior is guarding, the behavior itself begins to loosen, without force.
3. I listen for belonging
This is the thread most distinctive to my work, and it comes from the Family Constellation perspective.
I pay attention to belonging: who belongs and who was excluded, where loyalty lives, what your position in the family asked of you, and what may have been carried, quietly, across generations.
Sometimes the anxiety you feel is not only yours.
Sometimes a grief, a guilt, or a sense of not quite having a place began two generations back and never found resolution. When we can see these loyalties clearly, something in the system settles, and you get to choose what is actually yours to carry.
4. I work with the nervous system, not just the story
Insight matters, but understanding a pattern is not the same as changing it. You can know exactly why you shut down and still shut down.
So alongside the story, I track the body: activation and shutdown, safety and regulation, the subtle signals that tell me whether you are actually available to take something in. Change happens in the conditions where your system feels safe enough to try something new, including becoming receptive to another person again. We build those conditions together, session by session.
What this looks like in practice
Our work is a conversation, but not only a conversation. We talk, and we also notice what happens in your body as we talk. We may explore your family history, not as archaeology, but as a living map of the loyalties and exclusions still shaping your relationships today. Sometimes we slow down. Sometimes we name something that has never been said out loud. My job is to keep us at the depth where change is possible, and to make sure you feel safe while we are there.
I work with individuals, couples, and families, in English and Portuguese, in person in Marin and San Francisco and online across California.
Who this approach tends to help
The people who find me are often high functioning. From the outside, life looks fine. Inside, there is anxiety that will not lift, a stuckness you cannot think your way out of, or the same painful dynamic repeating in relationship after relationship.
Many of my clients are immigrants or adult children of immigrants, carrying the particular weight of belonging to more than one world. Many are people who sense, correctly, that their struggles did not start with them.
If any of this sounds familiar, we can figure it out together.
I offer a free 15-30 minute consultation, a simple conversation to see whether this way of working feels right for you.
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