Becoming a Therapist

I didn’t take a straight line to this work. In 2020 a business I’d spent years building came apart, and the pandemic closed the door on whatever was left. I was genuinely unsure what came next. Counseling was something I’d been circling for a long time, so I stopped circling and applied to graduate school.

I got into Golden Gate University’s Master of Arts in Counseling Psychology and spent two years in the coursework. I expected it to be a means to an end. Instead it was the thing I couldn’t stop reading about: how people are built, why they keep making the same moves, what actually shifts.

I interned for a year at the Pacific Center for Human Growth in Berkeley, which serves the LGBTQIA+ and BOPOC communities. From there I went to the Liberation Institute, then the Center for Mindful Psychotherapy, before starting my own practice, I’m Down.

What I do now is the part I didn’t see coming in 2020: sitting with people while they work out what’s actually driving the pattern, and what to do differently. If you’re thinking about therapy, I’m down for a conversation.