Better Now
Therapy
Specializations:
While I support clients with a variety of life challenges,
I have a special focus around the following three 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, destitute and the dying, established by St. Mother Teresa. This experience laid down the foundation for my commitment to grief work and supporting folks with loss and death anxiety.​​​​​
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Whether it is the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, a job, a career, or age-related decline, loss affects everyone, and will touch each of us throughout our lives.
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Grief is a profound, humbling, and deeply humanizing experience that shakes us awake, revealing our vulnerabilities, our impermanence, and still, our enduring love for life, for ourselves, and for others.
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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, held with safety, compassion, and care.
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"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​
2. Building Self-Worth &
Self-Esteem After Trauma
Self-worth is the inner belief that
your existence has value and that you deserve safety, kindness, and belonging, regardless of your past, your performance, or your imperfections. Self-esteem, on the other hand, is shaped more by external influences: your achievements, your skills, and the way you view your abilities in the world. Self-worth and self-esteem can influence each other, but they don’t always move together. For example, one person might feel worthy and deserving of care, even when their confidence is low. Another person might struggle with feelings of worthlessness, because they don’t trust their own strengths or abilities. On the other hand, someone may feel highly competent and skilled, while still questioning their inherent value.
These differences become even more pronounced when someone has experienced trauma.
Trauma isn’t just the difficult event itself, it’s the overwhelming emotional experience of feeling unsafe, unprotected, or overwhelmed (unable to cope). It can come from a single incident, like a painful loss or betrayal, or from ongoing experiences such as emotional neglect, chronic criticism, instability at home, discrimination, or relationships where your needs were dismissed.
When trauma occurs, it can deeply affect how you see yourself. It may teach you to believe that your worth is conditional, dependent on how well you perform, how little you need, or how perfectly you stay in control. Trauma can also weaken self-esteem by making you doubt your abilities, second-guess your strengths, or make you feel incapable even when you’re not.
Over time, survival patterns like self-criticism, perfectionism, emotional numbing, or people-pleasing can take hold, distancing you from your authentic feelings, and from a stable sense of your abilities, and true identity. Excessive shame or guilt can also develop.
In therapy, we will gently untangle these patterns so you can rebuild both self-worth and self-esteem on a foundation of safety, self-compassion, and truth.
3. 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, or processing trauma.
For example, I have observed many folks report dreams with a departed loved one, or an ex-partner, ex-boss, and even an ex-apartment. Past losses will inevitably show up in your dreams, including reminders of one’s traumatic childhoods or “lost childhood.”
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.​
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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. ​​
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“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