On curiosity, integrative therapy, and why I draw from every instrument I can.
There is something strange about my field that I’ve never quite made peace with. Psychology is, at its core, a discipline of openness — of holding space for complexity, of resisting the easy answer. And yet it can be remarkably, almost proudly, divided against itself.
The analysts tend to stay analysts. The CBT clinicians practice CBT. Each camp keeps largely to its own literature, its own language, its own certainties. I understand the appeal of that kind of loyalty — depth requires commitment, and no one can master everything at once. But I’ve never believed a person should draw all of their understanding from a single source. We wouldn’t read the news that way. Why would we treat the human psyche — so much more layered than any headline — as though one lens could ever take in the whole of it?
I’m not here to tell anyone their practice is wrong. I’m here to make a case for something I believe more firmly the longer I do this work: that being eclectic is not a lack of rigor. It’s a strength.
Integrative therapy: knowing which instrument to reach for
At heart, I love psychodynamic psychology. It’s where my instincts live — the conviction that we are shaped, often invisibly, by what came before, and that understanding is itself a kind of freedom.
And yet I am deeply trained in CBT, DBT, and ACT, and I love those too. I don’t experience this as a contradiction. I think behavioral change sits at the very core of what has to shift for anything in our lives to move — that we often have to do differently before we can feel differently. But I also think we stay stuck for reasons that run deeper than behavior, reasons a purely cognitive approach can be too quick to steer us away from rather than toward. Sometimes the work is to build the new habit. Sometimes it’s to sit with the old wound long enough to understand why the habit was so hard to build in the first place. You need more than one instrument to do both.
And underneath all of it, I am relational to my core. I believe we each meet the world, to some degree, through the earliest models we were handed — our first templates for what love, safety, and attention were supposed to feel like. You can’t give someone a worksheet for that. But you can sit with them inside it, and that changes things.
The things that light me up
Ask me what I love about the actual work and I could go on for a while, so here is a partial list.
I love behavioral activation — the quietly radical premise that when we’re feeling low, doing matters more than waiting for motivation to descend on us like good weather. Action tends to come first; the feeling follows. I love values-based work: the practice of building ordinary days around what we’ve decided makes a life worth living, and letting those values, rather than our moods, set the direction. I love the gentle start-up — opening a hard conversation softly, from your own perspective instead of an accusation — and how well it serves not just couples but anyone trying to be heard.
I love helping someone examine their perception of their own childhood: the role they played in their family growing up, and the role they may still be unknowingly playing out today, decades later, in rooms that only look different. I love cognitive reframing and opposite action — two different doors we can walk through to shift an uncomfortable emotion, one by changing the thought, the other by doing the very opposite of what the feeling is demanding. And I love neuroscience: the interplay between medication and neurotransmitters and how it shapes our mental health, right down to the chemistry humming beneath something as ordinary and as enormous as dating and falling in love.
I’m fascinated by all of it — and that, honestly, is the point. If I tried to narrow my niche any further, I’m not sure I could. Not because I won’t do the work to go deeper, but because I can’t seem to stop being curious about any of it.
Where the curiosity came from
I’ve been like this since I was a little girl — curious about practically everything, forever asking the next question.
I first wanted to be a veterinarian; I’ve always been pulled toward caring for something outside myself, long before I understood it as a calling. Then I pivoted to psychology and never looked back. I still remember learning about power poses in my high school AP Psychology class — the idea that simply standing in an open, outward-facing stance could change how you performed on an exam or a speech. That an arrangement of the body could reach up and alter the mind. I was captivated by that long before I had the language for it.
It kept showing up. I saw how a behavioral shift as ordinary as working out could change my capacity to sit with hard things. In college I fell for yoga, which carried me through a genuinely difficult stretch of my life and eventually led me to become a registered yoga teacher — so struck was I by how closely the body and mind move together. I’ve spent years in psychoanalytic settings and in analysis myself; I’ve worked in group practices grounded in CBT and DBT, and done cognitive work of my own. I didn’t arrive at integration as a strategy. I lived my way into it — and everything, every single approach, had something to give.
Curiosity, as a way of being
Here’s something you’d come to know about me whether you were my patient, my colleague, an acquaintance, or someone who once met me in passing: I am endlessly, almost helplessly curious. About people, especially. If we’ve spoken, I’ve probably asked you a question or two you found a little redundant — and the honest reason is simply that I wanted to understand you a bit more completely.
That curiosity isn’t a technique. It’s the actual center of how I work, and I think it’s the very thing the modality wars tend to forget. Before the framework, before the intervention, there is a person in front of you who has never existed before and never will again. No manual fully accounts for that.
The work never stops
Practicing on my own now is a gift I don’t take lightly, and I can’t imagine ever reaching a point where learning, training, and consultation feel like something I’ve outgrown.
I recently finished Gottman Level 2 training to work more deeply with couples, and I plan to become a certified financial therapist after that. Further out, I hold two ambitions that probably shouldn’t fit together but somehow do: I want to become a divorce mediator every bit as much as I want to train at a psychoanalytic institute and pursue my doctorate. Maybe one day I’ll do all of it.
In the meantime, the range shows up in the smaller things too. On my calendar right now there’s a webinar on ADHD and another on Freud. I’m reading two books at the same time that could not be more different — Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by the psychologist Lindsay Gibson, and Walking Red Flag by the comedian Jared Freid — which is honestly the whole picture in miniature: I want to keep deepening my understanding of people, and I want to keep it light and my jokes up to speed while I do it. In between, I’m tinkering with my website, sending clients resources I think might help, consulting with colleagues old and new, and — this part matters — taking care of myself.
My point is that the work never stops, and I don’t want it to. That’s the beauty of it. Every so often it’s a single theory, or even one well-placed quote, that quietly rearranges how I relate not just to my work but to my whole world. Now that I’m on my own, I get to be exactly the kind of therapist I believe in.
What an integrative approach means for you
If you know me, there’s a good chance you’re my patient for precisely this reason. In our work, I’m not going to hand you a single framework and call it the truth. I’ll draw from a range of them, offer you the parts that fit, and let you leave the rest — and yes, I’ll also hold you accountable to the exposure, the homework, the thing we agreed you’d try before next week. Warmth and rigor were never opposites.
I think the fact that I can openly say I contain multitudes — and that I’ll never know enough — tells you exactly the kind of therapist I am. Someone who can admit when she’s wrong. Someone who isn’t afraid to offer you an interpretation, and just as unafraid to hear what you make of it, to keep asking for your feedback, and to go learn whatever you need me to understand. Someone who will put the full measure of care you deserve into becoming who she is still becoming. Because what I want, far more than fidelity to any one method, is for you to feel genuinely attended to and seen — to have your inner world met as exactly what it is: a multitude of contradictions, wonders, and information, every part of it deserving of attention.
Being not only one thing is a strength in this world. And for all the training, the years, and the plans still ahead of me, the truth is that I’ve only just begun.