Asian American and Proud!
As a child of Filipino immigrants, I am especially interested in the mental health needs of Asian Americans and mixed people of color. I especially enjoy working with driven, hard-working professionals, especially those with a creative side.
A Little History
Prior to becoming a psychotherapist, I worked in publishing, as an editor on several technology magazines in San Francisco and London. Later I trained journalists in the use of technology. I know what it is to hold down a corporate position, balancing the pressure of work with a life beyond my job. I also know what it is to be POC in a predominantly white culture.
I had the privilege to travel to Mexico and around Europe as a teenager. As a college student, I lived and studied in France. As a young adult living in San Francisco, I met and married a British citizen. Together we made a trans-Atlantic move to live in England for almost two decades before returning to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Many years on, and I still have memories of chasing after double-decker buses each morning to get to my office along the Thames, and of descending into the bowels of London to take the Tube. Nostalgia washes over me when I recall living in a metropolis where the new and the old meld into one dense, chaotic, and exciting tapestry of experience. Yet it was always changing, and so was I, and after more then a decade spent under the English clouds, we returned to live in the California sunshine.
Career Change
After 20 some years in publishing, I did some soul searching about my career direction and eventually made a big change. And that is the short version of how I decided to become a psychotherapist. I earned my M.A. in Counseling Psychology in 2006.
My early experience in the field of mental health included work as a counselor in East Bay middle schools and community counseling centers. I did varied work, co-facilitated groups for Survivors of Suicide at Crisis Support Services of Alameda County, and trained in Multi-Systemic Therapy (MST) to work with youth in the Juvenile Justice System. However, none of this work was targeted to the specific population that I was most interested in: Asian Americans.
Launching My Practice
In 2012, I finally got around to launching my solo private practice and refocusing on serving people of color, with particular interest in working with 1.5 and 2nd generation AAPIs. I have always appreciated the complexities of people who identify with “betweenness” or who find themselves straddling cultural norms—because of my own personal connection to it, and that was the population I wished to serve.
In addition to my own personal history (born in the U.S. to Asian immigrant parents), many of the big events in my life have a theme of movement across cultures. Each member of my family has a back story of a trans-oceanic move—like a current that flows through our lives. My husband and I adopted our daughter in China, and so our family mix has members from 3 continents. We have 3 skin tones, and at least 3 ethnicites between us.
Mixed Cultures, Mixed-Race People
A legacy of having my own Asian mixed heritage (Filipinos are a mixed people—Malay, Spanish, Chinese, etc.), growing up with parents whose birth country was different than my own (whose country was subject to 400-some years of colonization) combined with my experiences living in other countries as a young adult has had a profound impact on me. It is at the core of my clinical focus on the experience of people of color and especially people of mixed heritage, and those who grew up in racially/culturally mixed families.
I am privileged to work with those who also experience “between-ness.” Awed, too, by their unique strengths and challenges. My work is to help make the invisible become visible, and to offer compassion for the deeply traumatic losses that are often experienced between parent and child—often without words—when people move from familiar context to foreign shores, when people migrate between cultures, between worlds.
Does any of this resonate with you? If so, please reach out. I may be a good fit to work with you. Or if you would like to know who I work with, click here to find out.
