Theoretical Orientation
Psychodynamic Theory
Psychodynamic theory holds that much of what determines our emotional lives operates outside of conscious awareness. Patterns of feeling, relating, and self-organization that developed in response to early environments continue to shape how a person moves through the world; often in ways that feel repetitive, confusing, or at contradictory to what they consciously want. Psychodynamic work attends to these patterns with curiosity rather than correction. The aim is not to eliminate symptoms but to expand a person's capacity to understand, tolerate, and make meaningful choices about their inner life. In my practice, this means paying close attention to affect, defense, and the ways a person has learned to manage experiences of vulnerability, desire, loss, and aggression; including within the therapeutic relationship itself.
My scholarly and clinical work is informed by several overlapping traditions in psychoanalytic thought, continental philosophy, and queer and trans of color theory. Together, these frameworks shape how I understand the therapeutic encounter, what I listen for, and how I think about change.
Relational Psychoanalysis
Relational psychoanalysis extends psychodynamic thinking by foregrounding the role of relationships, past and present, in the formation of psychic life. Rather than locating distress solely within the individual, relational theory understands the self as constituted through interaction: we become who we are in the context of the people and systems that hold us, fail us, recognize us, or refuse to. In the consulting room, this means the relationship between therapist and patient is not merely a backdrop for treatment: it is the treatment. I attend carefully to what unfolds between us in the room: patterns of trust and mistrust, moments of attunement and misattunement, experiences of rupture and repair. These dynamics often recapitulate a person's earliest relational experiences, and working through them together, in real time, is one of the most powerful mechanisms of therapeutic change.
Deconstructive Ethics
My clinical thinking is also informed by the tradition of deconstructive ethics, particularly the work of Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Judith Butler. These thinkers have shaped how I understand the ethical dimensions of the therapeutic encounter: the irreducible otherness of the person before me and in myself, the limits of what can be known or named, and the responsibility that arises precisely from that uncertainty. Derrida's attention to what exceeds or destabilizes fixed categories informs how I hold questions of identity, diagnosis, and narrative in therapy. Not as settled truths but as ongoing constructions that serve particular purposes and carry particular costs. Levinas's insistence on the primacy of the ethical relation , or the demand that the other's suffering places on us before any framework or theory, also grounds my commitment to a practice that begins with responsiveness rather than mastery. Similarly Butler's work on grievability, vulnerability, and the conditions under which a life becomes legible extends these concerns into the social field, asking whose suffering is recognized by the systems designed to name and treat it. In practice, this orientation keeps me attentive to what a clinical framework makes visible and what it forecloses, and it sustains a posture of humility toward the complexity of the people I work with.
Queer & Trans of Color Critique
Finally, my work is deeply shaped by queer of color critique and trans of color theory, examining how race, gender, sexuality, and class are not discrete categories but mutually constituting forces that organize both social life and psychic experience. These frameworks inform how I understand diagnosis, symptom presentation, and the clinical encounter itself. Many of the experiences that traditional clinical models pathologize (such as affective intensity, relational ambivalence, dissociation, distrust of institutions) are often coherent and even creative responses to conditions of sustained systemic violence. Rather than treating these as dysfunctional or pathological, I understand them as survival strategies that carry real intelligence about the worlds my patients have had to navigate. This perspective does not replace clinical training; it deepens it. It asks the clinician to take seriously the psychic stakes in systems organized around exclusion, and to recognize that many patients arrive in therapy having already done extraordinary work to survive. The task of the consulting room is not to fix what is broken but to understand what was built, and under what conditions, so that something new becomes possible.