About Me
I grew up in a small town in Oregon's Willamette Valley, where I developed a deep appreciation for the wild beauty of the Pacific Northwest. Since moving to Tucson in 2012, I've come to feel equally at home among the mountains, cacti, and desert landscapes of the Southwest.
My own ongoing path through healing is part of what led me to become a therapist and continues to shape how I approach my work. I meet the fullness and complexity of each person’s experience with compassion and curiosity. Across my clinical, educational, and collaborative work, I am interested in creating spaces where people can be understood more fully, reconnect with themselves, and develop more affirming ways of integrating their experiences.
Outside the office, you'll often find me writing, baking, creating art, tending to my houseplants, and running and hiking through the desert.
My Education & Training
I have worked in the social work field since 2007 and opened my therapy private practice in 2017. Before starting my career as a therapist in 2013, I worked in community settings helping people access housing, food, healthcare, income, and other essential resources. Those experiences continue to inform my understanding of the ways our relationships, communities, and systems shape our wellbeing.
I hold a Master of Social Work from Portland State University and have pursued additional training in EMDR, Internal Family Systems (IFS), Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), and Somatic Experiencing. My clinical work has increasingly focused on nuanced presentations of neurodivergence, particularly high-masking autism and ADHD. I offer assessment, consultation and educational services informed by this area of focus.
What Guides My Work
My experience as a therapist, artist, educator, social worker and human are always informed by anti-oppressive, collective liberation and body liberation principles and ethics.
Learning to love ourselves is not enough. I am a part of the collective water that continually works to dismantle the systems and structures that enforce and reinforce violence against humans based on color, gender, disability, size, sexuality and other lived identities and experiences.
Across my clinical, educational and collaborative work, I am committed to fat positive, feminist, anti-racist, disability justice, and queer and neurodivergent affirming practices. I believe that for any of us to be free, we must all be free.
My Lived Identities
I am neurodivergent, diagnosed late in life, and live with several chronic illnesses that commonly occur with neurodivergence. My experiences of gender and sexuality are fluid and non-binary. My ancestral lineages are primarily English on my maternal side and Korean on my paternal side. The members of my paternal family were refugees during the Korean war and my father subsequently immigrated to the United States around age 11.
My approach to this work has been meaningfully shaped by my lived experience as a neurodivergent, queer, white-passing mixed-race person familiar with illness. My lens has also been deeply influenced by my family's experience of poverty, war, racism and immigration.
