Free 20 minute call
Choose a time onlineText Robin
There are more times than the online calendar shows. Text, call or email and we will find one; we reply within two business days.
- Sees
- Adults, couples
- Where
- San Francisco office and telehealth throughout California
- Fee
- $275 individual sessions, $300 couples; private pay
Free 20 minute call
Choose a time onlineText Robin
415.493.8659robin@
There are more times than the online calendar shows. Text, call or email and we will find one; we reply within two business days.
Focus
- Creative people
- Anger and empowerment
- Attachment trauma
- Highly sensitive people
- Sex and intimacy
- Cultural disillusionment
- Leaders and changemakers
- Climate grief and anxiety
If you are fighting to feel alive and free, and you value honesty, integrity, and deep connection, I want to work with you.
We live in a culture of relentless commodification that breeds numbness, dissociation, and disconnection. I work with people who are disaffected by this and looking for a therapist who understands that their discontent may in part be a sign of being awake and alive.
How I work
Most of the time, therapy with me looks like two people sitting across from each other, talking. I listen carefully, I ask questions, and I follow what feels most alive in what you bring. I am interested in how you experience things, not only in what you think about them, and I pay attention to what is happening between us as well as within you.
I work in person at my San Francisco office and remotely, in roughly equal measure. I love working in person. There is no substitute for being in the same room, and it gives the work a depth and immediacy that is hard to find any other way. Remote sessions have their own value. On the phone, some people speak more freely when they don’t have to worry about being seen and can’t watch how the other person is affected. Video lets both of us do the work in the safety and convenience of home, or out in nature. On the weeks I work remotely, I sometimes take sessions from a campsite deep in the mountains. Many of my clients combine the two, and even a few meetings in person deepen the remote work.
Anything can be material: thoughts, feelings, memories, images, dreams, and what you make of me and of the therapy itself. My training is somatic, so I pay attention to the body as well as to what is said. Sometimes I may invite you to stay with a feeling a little longer, to notice a sensation, or to try something more active when words aren’t reaching what needs to move. These are invitations, and you can always decline or change course.
I will support you in developing deep self-awareness, strengthening your emotional resilience, and sharpening your communication skills so you can feel as empowered as possible. Often that means making room for what has been kept out, whether that is anger, desire, grief, or a creative impulse.
We cannot change the past, but we can heal old wounds by opening them and releasing what has been festering beneath the surface. We cannot change the culture, but we can learn to navigate it with clarity and to seek out the pockets of community and beauty that make life worth living. Love is ever-present, even when hidden. Therapy can help you recover your capacity to feel it, to trust it, and to live from it.
Who I am
I am a people person, and I have always been fascinated by how complex and contradictory we are. My sensitivity to what other people were feeling confused me when I was young. Becoming a therapist helped me understand it and put it to use, and I have watched the same turn happen for many of the people I work with: a sensitivity that once felt like a liability becomes a strength.
Before becoming a therapist I worked with children and young people in group homes, community centers, and San Francisco public schools. That work shaped my understanding of trauma as something that happens in families and in institutions.
I love music and dancing. I live in the Sierra Nevada foothills and spend as much time as I can in the high country and on whitewater. The solitude and rugged beauty of the mountains are deeply resourcing for me.
Education and training
I earned my M.A. in Somatic Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, a program that fit my sense that healing has to include the body. Embodiment can be painful and frightening, since it means feeling what you learned long ago not to feel, but learning to stay with sensation can increase your emotional regulation, your capacity for joy, play, vitality, and expression, and ultimately your sense of being grounded, centered, and comfortable in your own skin. Since then my study has centered on contemporary relational psychoanalysis, interpersonal neurobiology, attachment theory, trauma theory, and sociocultural theory, including years of study with Allan Schore, Stephen Seligman, Michael Soth, and Francine Lapides. Supervision and consultation are the other half of how I learned and how I keep learning. I have supervised therapists since 2018, at Well Clinic, the CIIS training clinics, and various community mental health and school-based settings, and I now train the associates at Embodied Relational Psychotherapy.
Get in touch
Free 20 minute call
Choose a time onlineText Robin
415.493.8659robin@
There are more times than the online calendar shows. Text, call or email and we will find one; we reply within two business days.