dreaming of & towards liberated care

As a queer, disabled, and racialized therapist, my care work is deeply informed by my lived experiences, social location, and vision for collective liberation. I’m especially passionate about practices of capacity building, generative discomfort, and living questions that create space for new possibilities. I invite us to engage with healing as a living process, and the possibility then of living as a healing process. What conditions need to be cultivated to support these practices and emergences? What resources need to be available and accessible?

Together we’ll practice interrupting cycles of psychological, emotional, and relational oppression. I am not your expert or savior. Rather than reenacting an institutional power-over dynamic that disempowers clients, we’ll co-create a container and ongoing dialogue that would best support your full humanity and ground our work in self-determination, sustainability, transparency, interdependence, and accessibility. The support I offer weaves together personal experience, ancestral and intergenerational wisdom, stories and contemplations, Western education and training, community organizing, and lots of questions and creative Madness. Always more questions than answers.

I believe that I still have as much to learn from you as you might be hoping to learn from me, and that together it becomes more possible to encounter new places of healing and possibility that neither of us are able to reach alone.

  • Psychotherapeutic lineages: attachment theory and object relations, humanistic therapy, play & expressive arts, liberation psychology, strengths-based, trauma-informed

    Cultural and spiritual lineages: Engaged Buddhism, storytelling and oral history keeping, Vietnamese folk traditions, refugee resourcefulness

    Justice lineages: disability justice, healing justice, Mad justice, anti-imperialism, harm reduction, abolition of all carceral systems, Black and indigenous feminisms and land back

I bring an intersectional and justice-informed lens to contextualize personal experiences within larger systems and histories.

Beyond merely tending to symptom relief, we begin to understand symptoms across mind, body, and spirit as protectors of your vulnerability, expressions of unmet needs, and the products of systemic and intergenerational dis-ease. We can also reclaim and co-imagine stories and legacies of joy, strength, meaning, and love.

we’ll face the tense realities of the world we live in while creating space for new possibilities.

The conditions of our world are traumatizing and disabling. Unacknowledged and unprocessed hurt, grief, and loss will inevitably reveal themselves in this work. We will learn to listen, to hold, to release, and to transform.

In small, sustainable ways we’ll practice stretching our capacity for complexity, curiosity, and compassion, revitalizing our connections to sensation and imagination.

you’re not alone. our struggles and our joys are connected.

You’ll be encouraged and supported to lean into collective care and interdependence, where you can challenge limiting beliefs around worthiness and enoughness.

By curiously examining the unfolding of our own relationship, we gain insight into our relational patterns and can explore ways of relating that feel more aligned with our values and dreams.

Safe connection is a core human need, whether with animal companions, plants, places, or people. Loneliness and isolation bring mental, emotional, and physical stress and dis-ease, while secure and nurturing relationships have always been pillars of resilience and growth.

Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before.

Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth… Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be… it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.

Alice Walker

“