I offer psychotherapy for children aged four to twelve, teenagers, individual adults, couples and families of all kinds, stepfamilies, and groups.

My areas of expertise include anxiety, depression, crisis intervention, grief work, stress management, posttraumatic stress and trauma recovery, sexuality, relationship and intimacy issues, divorce, remarriage, infertility and pregnancy loss, menopause, women’s issues and midlife, chronic illness, death and dying.

Over the past 30 years, I have developed my own holistic, integrative therapeutic approach. I was fortunate to arrive in San Francisco in the 1970s at the height of the Human Potential Movement, when family therapy was being invented. I was lucky enough to intern with a group of creative, innovative “cutting edge” clinicians who taught me to develop and value emotional aliveness and relatedness to my self and others. From them I learned play therapy with children, Expressive arts, couples and family therapy.

After several years working in community mental health, I went to live at Esalen Institute in the early 1980s to learn Gestalt therapy. My teacher, Dick Price, an Esalen’s co-founder, was also a Vipassana practitioner, so his version of Gestalt focused heavily on breath and awareness. This quickly led me to training and experience with somatic psychotherapy - neo-Reichian breath work -, which was very helpful to me in dealing with my repressed English childhood.

Since then my professional training and experience have included training in group therapy skills, psychodrama for group work, hypnosis for stress management and trauma recovery, and Attachment theory.

Integrating all my experience into my practice means that my work with all my clients focuses on deepening the client’s awareness of his/her moment-to-moment emotional and physiological “felt sense”. Developing awareness and self-acceptance can transform pain and suffering, and restore a kinder, fuller relationship to ourselves, to others, and to the world. My goal is always to provide a nurturing, safe, warm environment that respects each person’s needs and timing.

Together we work on

 • Experiencing, recovering from and containing emotional pain
 • Developing thinking skills and self-soothing skills
 • Increasing core vitality and an expanded experience of autonomy
 • As well a more deeply loving and accepting relationship to others and ourselves

With couples and families, I also utilize systems theory and family of origin approaches, communication and fair fighting skills. My goal is to help couples and families develop affection, playfulness, resilience, communication and problem solving skills so that they can move forward successfully and happily.

One of my specialties is step-couples and stepfamilies, which I come to from my own bumpy experiences as a stepmother. I also particularly enjoy working with unhappily single young women who are professionally successful and have difficulty with creating intimate relationships.

Since I am an immigrant, I understand the dynamics and difficulties of leaving one culture and adapting successfully to the United States. I usually have two or three clients who are European, British or Asian.

I am a visiting teacher at Esalen Institute, where I co-lead intensive weekend groups for the Work Study Program.

I am an Associate Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where I teach couples therapy in the Expressive Arts and Somatic Psychology Program. I have taught post-graduate courses in play therapy, couples and family therapy at the London Gestalt Center as well as at Bay Area universities including John F Kennedy University’s Graduate School of Holistic Studies, the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology and the California Institute of Integral Studies.

I provide supervision and consultation for pre-licensed and licensed clinicians both individually and in groups. I am a Certified Clinical Supervisor for the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists.

I am married to Michael Griffith and I am the stepmother of two adult sons. I love to sing and I am a member of two Bay Area choirs. I am working on a PhD thesis about Attachment Theory and Romantic Love.