Better Now
Therapy
Specializations:
While I support clients with a variety of life challenges,
I have a special focus around the following challenges:
1. Grief & Loss
Very early in my career, I had the great privilege of working in Kolkata, India, across various NGOs, including Nirmal Hriday (Pure Heart), a hospice for the sick, homeless, and dying. This experience laid down the foundation for my commitment to grief work and supporting folks with loss.
Whether it is the death of a loved one, age-related decline, the end of a relationship, job, career, or earth-grief, loss affects everyone, and will touch each of us throughout our lives.
Grief & loss are profound, humbling, and deeply humanizing experience that shakes us awake, revealing our vulnerabilities, impermanence, and still, our enduring love for life, ourselves, and others.
Loss may also highlight the anxiety or fears that comes up when faced with mortality, forcing us to question the purpose or meaning of our lives (death and existential anxiety).
In therapy, we will allow your unique grief process to unfold naturally, without pressure. It’s important that space and time are honored, so your grief can stretch at its own pace, with safety, compassion, and care.
Lastly, for folks with childhood trauma, a sense of having a "lost childhood," is a common feeling. In these cases, some of the goals in treatment include: grieving the full childhood you never had, making peace with the unpleasant feelings you have towards your caregivers, and building practices that help you safely and lovingly re-connect with your inner-child.
"If our hearts are ready for anything, we can open to our inevitable losses, and to the depths of our sorrow. We can grieve our lost loves, our lost youth, our lost health, our lost capacities. This is part of our humanness, part of the expression of our love for life."
-Tara Brach
3. Emotional Regulation skills
Emotional regulation is the ability to notice, understand, and move through emotional states without becoming overwhelmed, shut down, or disconnected from yourself.
For many people, especially those with histories of trauma, grief, or chronic stress, this capacity was never safely learned or supported.
When emotional experiences have felt too intense, unpredictable, or unsafe, the nervous system adapts. You may find yourself becoming easily flooded by anxiety, anger, or shame, or on the other end of the spectrum, feeling emotionally numb, detached, or disconnected from your inner world.
In therapy, we work gently and collaboratively to expand your capacity to stay present with your emotions, rather than being overtaken by them or needing to push them away. This includes learning how to recognize emotional cues in the body, understand what your emotions are communicating, and develop tools that support grounding, containment, and emotional flexibility.
Over time, emotional regulation work helps restore a sense of internal safety and self-trust. As your nervous system becomes more supported, emotions feel less threatening and more informative. This allows for deeper emotional processing, clearer boundaries, and more choice in how you respond to yourself, to others, and to life’s inevitable challenges.
4. Dream-Work
Not only are dreams a valid and meaningful part of one’s psyche, but they are also a crucial area to explore in therapy, especially when you are moving through grief, loss, processing trauma, or getting to know your Self.
Dreams are a timeless and deeply human form of knowing and meaning-making that has existed across cultures and throughout history.
Dreams often act as an emotional bridge between what we consciously understand and what the deeper psyche is still trying to integrate. They can reveal unspoken fears, unresolved longings, and unfinished emotional conversations that you may not yet have words for. In this way, dream work becomes a gentle yet powerful doorway into the parts of yourself that are asking to be seen.
If you have pleasant, unpleasant, or recurring dreams, dream-work will help you widen your self-understanding and trust your intuitive pull toward becoming a more conscious and whole being. It also provides a safe space to explore symbolic themes, emotional patterns, and inner conflicts that may feel too overwhelming to access directly in waking life.
“The unconscious sends us dreams as one of its most direct forms of healing and instruction. They come to break open what has become too rigid, to bring warmth where we have gone cold, and to remind us of the parts of ourselves we have exiled or forgotten.”
- Clarissa Pinkola Estés
2. Building Self-Worth & Self-Esteem After Trauma
Self-worth refers to your underlying sense that you have inherent value as a person, independent of your behavior, achievements, appearance, how much money you make, or how others respond to you. At its core, it is the sense that you matter simply because you exist.
This sense of worth is not formed in isolation. It develops over time through lived experience, especially in early and important relationships, and within the society and time we live in. For example, when someone is consistently met with care, respect, and emotional attunement (in personal relationships and /or social environments), they are more likely to internalize a stable sense of inherent worth. Meanwhile, when someone experiences neglect, criticism, inconsistency, or emotional harm (in personal relationships and/or social environments), they may adapt by developing beliefs such as:
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I am not important,
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My needs are too much,
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I have to earn care, or
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I am safer when I minimize myself.
These beliefs are not reflections of a person’s actual value. They are adaptations to relational environments that shaped what felt necessary for connection or safety at the time.
Over time, repeated relational experiences influence what a person comes to believe they are “allowed” to have, such as:
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needs
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boundaries
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care
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rest
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respect &
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belonging.
This can lead to a form of conditional self-worth, where a sense of value becomes tied to:
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pleasing others
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performance
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emotional suppression
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achievement or productivity
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avoiding conflict or rejection.
Importantly, these are not character flaws. They are often adaptive strategies that developed in response to relational environments that felt unpredictable, rejecting, or emotionally unsafe.
Self-esteem refers to how you evaluate your abilities, effectiveness, or competence in specific areas of life. Self-esteem naturally fluctuates based on experience: feedback, success, failure, comparison, and learning.
Self-love is how you relate to yourself in real time.
It includes:
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your internal tone toward yourself or self-talk
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how you respond emotionally to difficulty
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how you care for your needs &
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how you set boundaries with yourself and others.
Self-love is expressed in whether you meet your internal experience with understanding,
self-compassion, and care or
self-criticism, avoidance, or harshness. It is the ongoing practice of how you are with yourself, especially in moments of stress or vulnerability.
Trauma refers to experiences that overwhelm emotional capacity, often involving threat, neglect, betrayal, or chronic invalidation. When these experiences occur (via in personal relationships or society, through discrimination or economic exploitation), the nervous system develops adaptive strategies to maintain safety, connection, or stability.
These may include:
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people-pleasing to avoid rejection
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perfectionism to prevent criticism
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emotional suppression or shutdown
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self-blame to create a sense of control
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over-adapting to maintain connection
While these strategies can be adaptive in unsafe environments, they often shape how a person relates to themselves over time. These patterns can affect:
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Self-worth: Worth may become conditional: tied to being useful, pleasing, or emotionally manageable for others.
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Self-esteem: Confidence in one’s abilities may become unstable, even when actual competence is intact.
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Self-love: The internal relationship may become more critical, pressured, or disconnected from genuine care.
Together, these patterns can move a person away from a stable, accurate, and internally grounded sense of self.
The therapeutic process
In therapy, the goal is not to override these patterns, but to understand them in context and gradually separate survival adaptations from identity.
Over time, this allows:
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self-worth to become more stable and internally grounded
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self-esteem to become more flexible and reality-based
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self-love to become more consistent, compassionate, and responsive
The work is less about "building confidence’ and more about restoring a stable internal relationship with yourself, one that isn’t organized around past survival patterns.
Suffering is part of being human, and many of us carry the impact of past experiences. Therapy aims to help you move toward a more whole, integrated version of yourself, rather than becoming defined by that suffering.
“It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.”
-James Baldwin