I offer an environment for couples, triads and polyamorous or BDSM families that respects your lifestyle choices and understands how your lifestyle provides you with strengths and resources you can use to work on your problems.

Solution-Focused Therapy for Individuals

We apply tools and techniques from cognitive and behavioral therapies to solve a problem.  People often come in for support with a job search, or making a difficult decision, getting through college or graduate school, or with very concrete goals of being able to do something without anxiety or poor self-esteem getting in the way.  How did you learn the way you deal with this now?  How has that served you so far.  What might you choose to do differently?  How you could learn new emotional skills?  Many of the tools I employ are directed at developing a practice of being kind to yourself and treating yourself very well, especially when approaching a difficult task.  This is how I got through graduate school.

Individual Therapy for Deep Healing

Compassion begins at home.  Opening your heart to yourself may not be easy, but it's certainly worth it.  This first step toward healing old wounds can constitute a solid foundation for the project of building self-awareness and self-love.  The better you know yourself, the more choices you have, and the freer you are.

The challenge is to become conscious.  I'm a great believer in the power of consciousness.  My work is informed by Jung's concept of Shadow, the things we refuse to see, that we exclude from the light.  So the therapy work is dragging all that sticky stuff out into the light of day.  Once you have found a safe way to be aware of whatever was getting in the way, healing progresses rapidly.

Therapeutic techniques might include sand tray, art therapy, EMDR, guided visualization, journaling, homework and role play.

I offer acceptance, unconditional positive regard, and a warm relationship with gentle challenge to support you on your journey through your own emotions.

Issues Therapy Can Help With:

I approach my clients' difficulties as problems that we can work on together, rather than as illnesses.  I prefer that you define or choose the problems you want to work on - and I do not believe in adjusting my clients to fit my theories.  While we certainly spend some time figuring out where problems come from,  I think more of the answers are found in trying something new or different, and finding ways to draw on your own strengths and skills to deal with those problems in the present and in the future.

Following is a list of problems or goals of therapy that I have special expertise with.

Polyamory

Co-author of The Ethical Slut, I have lived a consciously open lifestyle since 1969.  I have extensive experience in intentional communities, alternative families and childrearing, and subcultures of lesbian women, the pansexual communities, and gay men, who helped raise my child with me.

Unlearning jealousy is a healing path.  I have come to believe, through nearly forty years of experience in polyamory, that there is no such thing as jealousy, that what we call jealousy is am expression of some conflict we have inside of us that we fear we have no power to change.  So we project it onto our partners and ask them to take care of it for us.  To unlearn jealousy is to make friends with our fears, welcome them back home and offer ourselves comfort and healing.  Once we are confident that we can take care of ourselves when we feel less than fabulous, managing jealousy becomes easy, and we need no longer fear it.  After forty years of nonmonogamy, I still get jealous, but it has become a sort of non-event, sometimes even a delight of sorts as I find new ways to be nice to myself.

Relationship Conflicts

Conflict management means learning to handle your disagreements and arguments, however heated, more fruitfully.  Conflict in relationships is about striving together to evolve this relationship to its next higher level - and then the one after that, and so on.  Most of us have been taught to avoid conflict at all costs.  Anger can be a scary feeling, but it is also a powerful messenger that often tells us what we want to work toward.  I like to help people get comfortable enough with conflict to develop good tools in communicating, and in taking care of yourself and each other, so you can reap all those benefits and keep growing together.

AIDS, Cancer and other Grave Illnesses

Let me help you discover your will to thrive.  I have worked personally and professionally with people with AIDS, cancer and other serious and/or disabling medical conditions.  My experience is that enhanced health and improved quality of life can be achieved by dealing with the depression and loss that accompany all serious physical conditions.  Psychotherapy can help you to assert yourself with medical providers and insurance companies, get better care, maximize your health, and build a rewarding life for yourself in the present, in the body you are currently inhabiting.  Sometimes psychotherapy can help you get healthy.  And sometimes psychotherapy can help you prepare for the end of a life when that event appears on the horizon.

Emotional Wisdom: Depression, Anxiety, Panic, Mood Swings, Grief
Contentment, Love, Good Will, Joy


Most people come to therapy to deal with emotional pain.  I like to work with people to build containers for difficult emotions, what you might think of as conscious defenses, and to treat overwhelming emotions much as you would the flu - by being kind to yourself.  When you feel confident that you can take care of yourself when you are scared or in pain, then you can afford to stay conscious while you feel your emotions and learn from them.  Then healing can begin.

Medications can be useful, sometimes for brief periods to get through a difficult time, and sometimes for longer term - I have extensive experience coordinating with physicians and psychiatrists. Therapy is a powerful tool for the resolution of emotional problems.  Most research studies have come to the same conclusion - the ideal treatment is not either medications or therapy, but therapy with or without medications.  All clients studied did better when they had therapy.

All intense emotions can feel frightening - Jung pointed out that most of us experience emotion as if it were being done to us, or happening to us, and not something that we are doing.  I like to work with people to own their emotions and develop their abilities to make choices about how they feel.

Survivors of Childhood Trauma and Abuse

The ultimate betrayal is for a child to be abused, physically, sexually and emotionally, by the adults in the family they need to rely on to survive.  Sexual and physical abuse, and also serious illness or other trauma in childhood can result in longstanding problems. Children learn terrible things from abuse, and lose the opportunity to learn what a healthy childhood would have given them - experiences of being loved and protected, boundaries, a proud identity.

Becoming conscious of childhood trauma is very difficult - many of us have worked virtually our whole lives to not remember, and learned habits of disassociation and avoidance that protected us when we were young but block us now.  The task of therapy becomes to convince our emotional memories that we are now adults and can take care of ourselves, that we are now safe, and that there is nothing to fear in the present:  we have already survived.

I have opened many cans of worms with abuse survivors since I started working with these issues back in 1979.  I think we often put the lid on memories of trauma and the overwhelming feelings that are connected to those memories, and tell ourselves that in order to never feel this bad again we will keep that lid on forever.  And these are often indeed some very nasty worms.  What we can do in therapy is find safe ways to open that can up and maybe take out one little worm, watch it crawl around, and then put it back in the can and put the lid back on.  Cans of worms don't actually explode when you look at them in a clear and supportive light.

Populations Served:

Sexual minorities of all stripes (and circles and squiggles). 

Grasping sexuality and developing new models of relating have the mainstay of my feminism and also my spiritual path, an awakening to the possibilities of who I can be and an abundant source of energy for life.  Working with a richness of possibilities that my clients bring into my office - far more than I could even imagine - makes being a therapist to our communities a very rewarding experience.

Polyamorists Of All Lifestyles

I am, with Janet Hardy, co-author of  The Ethical Slut, the classic handbook for pioneers in new paradigms of families and relationships and explorers opening up new paths of sexual freedom.  I have been nonmonogamous myself since 1969, and have been teaching others about it ever since.  I can offer support in building the lifestyle and the family you have always wanted.

SM Tribes, BDSM, DS, MS, Leather Faeries

I have been active in the SM community since 1974, and am well-versed in the entire spectrum of safe, sane and consensual BDSM lifestyles.  In my practice I can offer support for those coming out or working on exploring new parts of themselves to explore in SM role play.

I have co-authored four books about SM, including the Topping and Bottoming Books, described below.  I have been working as a therapist with BDSM players since 1991, and I can offer support for those coming out or working on developing new roles, and help people who are working out their play together.  I also work on those life issues - anxiety,depression, etc., that bring most people into therapy - to leather people, that means access to a therapist who understands and supports your lifestyle.

One of the most wonderful gifts of SM role play is that we can have room for all of our wondrously diverse selves.   I can help you find ways to express minority parts of yourself in scene space, and learn from your play more about who you are and who you can be.

Transgender: Transperson, Gender fluid, Gender Queer, Intersex and Those Who Love Them

I believe that our society has made so many rules about how we are supposed to (and emphatically not supposed to) express our gender that we no longer know what gender is.  Gender is very important to each of us, and we can all learn more about it when we appreciate the amount of dedicated hard and dangerous work transgendered people invest in expressing their genders as it fits for them.  Gender is essential to our sense of identity, and to how we feel recognized by others.

Transgender people are forging new trails for all of us and deserve our support.  My life as an androgynous feminist (yes, I consider myself androgynous even though I like to wear skirts) has been mightily enriched by my transgender sisters and brothers since 1976, and I have been privileged since 1991 to work with many clients who are transitioning into living completely as their true selves.

Sex Workers and Those Who Love Them

Artists in the sexual realm and practitioners of the sexual healing arts are the most often pathologized of our sexual minorities, and yet they carry tremendous wisdom gleaned from walking this not often acknowledged path.

I have familiarity with the world and cultures of sex work and experience as a therapist with sex workers, their significant others and their clients.

Spiritual Travelers: Pagans, Buddhists, Yogis, Tantrikas and Meditators

When it comes to religion, I am a pluralist.  I understand that nobody has a monopoly on spiritual  truth, not even me.  This is what makes me a pagan, studying old and new paths that others have taken to connect to spirit.

All paths lead up the same mountain.  My own path has led me through various forms of yoga, research in medieval mystics, psychedelics, buddhism, tantra, assorted gods and goddesses and connection with Nature and animal spirit medicine.

I believe that all sex is sacred, and that all sexual connections provide spiritual awakening.

As a psychotherapist, I can offer support in developing visualizations, meditations and ritual practices that are useful in understanding your own emotional journey, and in interpreting the symbols found in dreams and visions.

Queer People: Lesbians, Gay men, Bi Folk, Pansexual and Questioning

Over the years I have lived in many communities:  women's culture, communally with gay men for fifteen years, bi and pansexual culture, polyamorous cultures and, of course, leather community.  I am profoundly grateful to all of the different people in my life from whom I have learned so much:  friends, family, lovers, colleagues and clients.  There are so many ways for people to connect, and I have developed deep respect for Love in all her manifestations.