I am a psychoanalyst, psychotherapist, a musician, and an editorial board member at Dialogues in Health journal. I come from a teaching background and have had a longstanding desire to learn about the human psyche. I wanted to know why people are the way they are, why they vary in their emotional responses, why they react differently toward the same experience, and why one person chooses a genre of music, specific food, and a type of person to date while another person makes different choices. Eventually, I decided to take the plunge, leave my teacher’s training and engineering degree behind and start my BA in applied psychology, followed by my MA in Clinical Mental Health Counselling, and along the way, I started my psychoanalytic training where my thesis was on paintings and personality. I completed my doctoral studies in psychology (PsyD) wherein I researched the impacts of music improvisation on the psyche.

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Finally, I have been in your shoes!

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Becoming a psychoanalyst is a long process and it takes so much inner work: as a requirement for my psychoanalytic training, I had to go through my personal analysis. Learning about myself has facilitated my therapeutic work; it also helped me understand how it feels to be sitting on your side, to be in your shoes, and feel what you may be going through during your therapy.

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My Approach: Working Beneath the Surface

In psychoanalytic therapy and psychoanalysis, we look at and analyze the immediate issues, but also the deeper issues to make a deeper change since the aim is for you to find yourself, to gain insight, and to explore the upsetting recurrent patterns that impact your emotional and mental health.

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I work with adults struggling with chronic complex conditions and repeated patterns manifested in various areas of life, and colleagues often refer to me for these concerns:

Abuse                                        Infidelity and trust 

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Anxiety                                    Intimacy and sex

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Behavioral addiction               Eating disorders

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Body image                             Kinks and fetishes           

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Creative blocks                       Masochism

Depression                              Obsessive thoughts

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Dreamwork                             Personality disorders

Somatization                          Self-Esteem & Self-Worth

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Fear of Abandonment           Grief of Miscarriage

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Personal Growth                   Trauma (abuse, assault, rape)   

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Is Trauma always the result of living through a war?

No, it is not. Trauma, according to Spiegel, is "the experience of being made into an object, the victim of someone else's rage, of nature's indifference, or one's physical and psychological limitations."

Elizabeth F. Howell

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What Does the Fear of Abandonment Look Like?

The individuals who struggle with this fear in their relationships strive to "attain the assurance of love and, consequently, the maintenance of security" because even the thought "of abandonment creates anxiety which" results in"the non-valued self."

Germaine Guex  

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What does Masochism mean?

"The term masochism as used by psychoanalysts does not connote a love of pain and suffering. The person who behaves masochistically endures pain and suffering in the hope, conscious or unconscious, of some greater good" and "masochistic behavior is not necessarily pathological" it is "self-abnegating."

Nancy McWilliams 

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What is Somatization?

"Somatization is what analysts have called the process by which emotional states become expressed physically."

Nancy McWilliams