If any of the following resonate, you're in the right place.

You feel disconnected from your body or frustrated that it seems to have a mind of its own. You've been described as a Type-A person and have difficulty slowing down, even when you're exhausted. You carry chronic stress that never seems to fully resolve. You experience persistent pain, tension, fatigue, digestive issues, or other physical symptoms that worsen during periods of stress.

Maybe anxiety, overthinking, or rumination keep you up at night. Maybe you're a first responder carrying the weight of the work, or a partner or spouse impacted by the demands that come with it.

Different stories. Different symptoms. Similar nervous system.

All of these people are my people.

Absolutely.

Many people I work with would never describe themselves as having trauma. They come in because they're stressed, burned out, anxious, angry, overwhelmed, or feeling disconnected from themselves, their relationships, or their lives.

You don't need to identify your experience as trauma for us to work together. If stress is showing up in your body, relationships, or daily life, we can start there.

I know it can be difficult to think of your own experience as trauma. Culturally, we've created ideas about what counts and what doesn't. You had to go to war. It had to be severe enough. Someone else had it worse.

But trauma is often less about the event itself and more about how your nervous system experienced and adapted to it.

I think of trauma as any experience that was too much, too fast, too soon, or too overwhelming for your system to fully process at the time. It can be a single event. It can happen repeatedly over months or years. It can also be the accumulation of chronic stress without enough recovery in between.

Your nervous system doesn't compare experiences. It responds to what exceeds its capacity to cope.

If your body is still carrying it, it counts.

There is no universal timeline.

Everyone is different. The type of trauma matters. Was it a single incident? Something that happened repeatedly over time? Or is it something that is still happening, like chronic workplace stress or a difficult relationship?

Your current stressors, support system, and nervous system's capacity for regulation all influence the pace of therapy.

What I can tell you is this: regardless of where you start, we'll move toward greater regulation, resilience, and flexibility.

Progress is rarely linear. There are periods of growth, plateaus, setbacks, and breakthroughs. But healing is cumulative. Each session builds awareness, capacity, and a stronger foundation for change.

No, and let me be honest about what that means.

We will touch into difficult experiences, and some details may come up. But we move at a pace your nervous system can handle. We don't stay in the hard material too long. Instead, we move between what's difficult and what's more settled, building the capacity to process without becoming overwhelmed.

Often the experience shows up in the body first through tension, breath, activation, or other physical responses. We can work directly with those experiences, sometimes with very few words.

Healing doesn't require telling every detail of your story. Over time, however, making meaning from what happened is often part of the process.

The body frequently leads us there before the words do.

Somatic simply means related to the body.

Somatic therapy recognizes that stress and trauma affect more than thoughts and emotions. They can also influence breathing patterns, muscle tension, sleep, digestion, energy levels, and how the nervous system responds to the world.

Working somatically means we pay attention to both what you're experiencing psychologically and what your body is doing at the same time.

Lasting change often happens when both are included.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is an evidence-based therapy designed to help the brain and nervous system process experiences that feel stuck.

When overwhelming experiences occur, they may not become integrated like ordinary memories. Instead, they can continue to show up through intrusive thoughts, strong emotional reactions, negative beliefs, flashbacks, or physical sensations that seem disconnected from the present.

EMDR uses bilateral stimulation, often through eye movements, tapping, or auditory tones, to support adaptive processing. As processing occurs, many clients find that memories become less emotionally charged, gain new perspectives, and feel more connected to the larger story of their lives.

EMDR is not about erasing memories or forgetting what happened. It's about helping the brain and nervous system update how the experience is stored so it no longer feels as if it is happening in the present.

Somatic Experiencing is a body-oriented approach to healing stress and trauma developed by Dr. Peter Levine.

The foundation of Somatic Experiencing is the idea that when we face overwhelming or threatening experiences, the body automatically mobilizes survival responses such as fight, flight, freeze, or collapse.

Animals often show observable recovery behaviors after threat has passed, such as shaking, trembling, orienting, or spontaneous movement before returning to normal activity.

Humans frequently interrupt or suppress these responses because they feel uncomfortable, unsafe, embarrassing, or impractical. While suppressing these strategies help us function, the nervous system may continue carrying aspects of that survival activation long after the danger has passed.

The goal of Somatic Experiencing is to help the nervous system develop greater flexibility and recognize that the threat is no longer occurring, allowing the body to respond more effectively in the present.

Both are trauma-focused approaches, but they have different entry points.

EMDR often begins with distressing memories and helps reprocess how those memories are stored. Somatic Experiencing focuses on nervous system responses and bodily sensations associated with stress and trauma, working with what the body is experiencing in the present moment.

I integrate both intentionally. Somatic Experiencing can help build the capacity to manage distress that may arise during EMDR, making the process more sustainable and effective over time.

I am currently awaiting my California Associate Marriage and Family Therapist (AMFT) and Associate Professional Clinical Counselor (APCC) registration numbers. I will begin accepting therapy clients under clinical supervision in August or September 2026.

If you'd like to be notified when appointments become available, you can fill out my contact form.

I am based in the Sacramento area. 

Therapy services will be provided in-person in the Sacramento area and online for California residents beginning in August or September 2026.

Pilates sessions are offered online and in-person in San Francisco one day per week.

Coming soon.

Coming soon.

No, and I want to be clear about why.

Pilates with me is strictly movement based. The focus is biomechanics, pain patterns, movement efficiency, and physical correction. It may feel therapeutic because of the nervous system lens I bring to every session, but it remains a movement based service with its own professional boundaries — including hands on cueing and physical correction that belong in a movement relationship, not a therapy relationship.

As a therapist, I have ethical and legal responsibilities that require clear boundaries and a different type of professional relationship. While I may incorporate movement, body awareness, and nervous system education into therapy, I cannot maintain a separate Pilates relationship with someone who is also my therapy client.

To protect both the therapeutic process and the integrity of our work together, I keep those roles separate.

Most of my students come with a pain problem, and the first thing they learn is pain is a brain problem that requires retraining. 

Many people understand where they hurt. Fewer understand why their body keeps returning to the same patterns. Movement alone can strengthen and mobilize. But without understanding why your nervous system is organizing the way it is, the patterns come back.

Combining movement with nervous system education changes that. Clients don't just feel better in sessions. They start to understand what their body is communicating and develop the awareness to work with it rather than against it.

That's the difference between managing pain and actually changing it.

It’s not yoga, or done in a heated room. 

Pilates is named after its creator, Joseph Pilates, who originally called his method Contrology. A boxer by training, Pilates worked with Scotland Yard officers and rehabilitated injured soldiers during WWI. From the beginning, Pilates was designed as a system for strength, resilience, injury prevention, and recovery.

Classical Pilates honors the original method and repertoire, taught in the order and intention Joseph Pilates designed. It's a complete system intended to build balanced strength and mobility throughout the body. It's not about working harder. It's about working smarter—developing balance, efficiency of movement, and vitality from the inside out.

When Pilates immigrated from Germany to New York in 1926, his studio happened to share a building with George Balanchine, one of the most celebrated choreographers in the world. Pilates began rehabilitating Balanchine's injured dancers. His guarantee was simple: "If I can't fix you, you don't have to pay me."

Unsurprisingly, dancers fell in love with it. For decades, Pilates lived almost exclusively in the dance world before eventually becoming mainstream.

Joe built it to fix injuries and improve human movement. That's still what we're doing.

Think of it like any skill or muscle you're trying to develop. Once a week is a starting point, and depending on your needs we may meet weekly or every other week.

But sessions don't exist in isolation. Each time we meet I give you something to take home. A tool, a fascial release, or a short routine specific to what we worked on. Over time those pieces build into a protocol designed around you specifically.

In the beginning we move slowly and intentionally. A lot of the early work is done around body awareness. Without it, you won't be able to change the movement impulses that are getting in the way. From there we build. Correcting diaphragmatic breathing, developing body mapping skills, and layering in exercises chosen for your specific patterns.

The goal is that everything we work on gets woven into your daily life. How you sit, stand, and move through your day. That's how the body actually adapts.

This is a lifestyle shift, not just a weekly session.

I offer both online sessions via Zoom and in-person sessions in San Francisco.

Online

50-minute private session: $120

50-minute duet session: $135

In-Person

50-minute private session: $135

50-minute duet session: $150

If you're unsure which option is the best fit, feel free to reach out and I'd be happy to discuss your goals.