What I help with
The concerns people bring to me most often
These are patterns I see rather than a fixed list. If what you're dealing with isn't here, it's still worth asking.
01
Depression, anxiety, and insomnia
Many of the people I see have been in talk therapy already, sometimes for years. They understand their history and can describe their patterns clearly, and they've come looking for a different way to work.
Music therapy engages emotion, memory and the body more directly than conversation does. That doesn't make it better than talk therapy — it makes it a different route, and for some people it's the one that moves.
- Talk therapy has been useful but hasn't produced the change you hoped for.
- Your anxiety is physical as much as it is mental.
- You'd like to try something experiential rather than mainly verbal.
02
Intergenerational and cultural trauma
Families carry things across generations without discussing them — migration, hardship, loss, political upheaval. What reaches the next generation is often not a story but an atmosphere: unexplained rules, silences around certain subjects, a tension that was there before there were words for it.
I was born in China and I work in English and Mandarin. Immigrant family dynamics are familiar to me, so there is less you'll need to explain from the beginning.
This material was mostly transmitted without language, which is part of why language struggles to reach it. Music works in a similar register.
In my experience it also allows people to approach family history without having to make an accusation about parents who were, by their own lights, doing their best.
03
Narcissistic relationships and the patterns that repeat
This includes relationships with a narcissistic partner, parent or employer. What I see most often afterward is not only the effect of what happened, but a lasting uncertainty about one's own judgment — people arrive able to argue the other person's position more fluently than their own.
Much of the work is rebuilding trust in your own perception. Music therapy suits this: you are the one describing what you notice, and my role is to stay with it rather than to interpret or correct it.
People also often arrive able to name their attachment style and describe the pattern accurately while still living inside it. Understanding a pattern and changing it are different tasks, and the second one usually needs to happen somewhere other than in explanation.
- You find yourself rehearsing ordinary conversations in advance.
- You explain or minimize the other person's behavior when describing it.
- You're unsure whether your account of what happened is accurate.
- Fear of abandonment that doesn't respond to reassurance.
- Expectations absorbed from family or culture that were never agreed to.
04
Music performance anxiety and stage fright
For musicians, performers, and anyone whose work is judged in public. I'm a performing violinist as well as a board-certified music therapist, and I know what the minutes before walking onstage actually feel like.
- You play well in the practice room and lose something the moment there's an audience.
- You've started avoiding auditions, solos, or recitals, and told yourself it was a scheduling problem.
- The physical symptoms arrive before you're nervous — hands, breath, and heart rate ahead of the thought.
05
Cultural adjustment and building a life in a new country
Loneliness, the work of finding community, and the gap between the life you came here to build and the one you're actually living. Underneath it, grief that rarely gets named as grief — leaving a country is a loss, but it's not treated as one. I made this move myself.
I also work with people in intercultural and interracial relationships, where the differences that cause the most friction are rarely the visible ones. Assumptions about family obligation, money, conflict, and how much of your private life belongs to your relatives tend to go unspoken until they collide — and by then the argument is usually about something else.
- Something hard happens and there's no one here who knows you well enough to tell.
- You're a different person in your second language: less funny, less certain, less yourself.
- Everyone assumes you're fine because you chose this — and some days you just want to put your head on someone's shoulder and cry.
- You and your partner are arguing about money or family in a way that never quite resolves, because you're not actually arguing about money or family.
- One of you thinks something is obvious and the other has never heard it stated out loud.
06
Psychedelic integration and non-ordinary states
Preparation before a psychedelic experience in a legal clinical, research or ceremonial setting: set and setting, coping tools, and practice navigating a non-ordinary state. Afterward: integration and meaning-making following a retreat, clinical trial, or treatment. I don't provide or supervise any substance.
- You have a session, retreat, or trial coming up and want to prepare rather than simply arrive.
- Something happened during an experience that you haven't been able to put into words since.
- You've talked it through and the talking hasn't touched it.
07
Grief and loss, including the losses nobody recognizes
Grief tends to outlast the period during which people around you ask about it. Many of the people I see stopped mentioning theirs long before it eased.
I spent a decade in oncology and palliative care. I'm comfortable staying with grief for as long as it takes, and I don't work from a timeline.
- A death, whether recent or many years ago.
- Anticipatory grief, when someone is still alive and declining.
- The end of a relationship, a move away from home, a change in health.
- Losses that other people didn't recognize as losses.
08
Life direction and family expectations
Questions about who you are apart from the roles you occupy — the professional version, the version your parents know, the version that exists in another language. For people navigating more than one culture, these can be genuinely difficult to separate.
This isn't work where I tell you what you should conclude. Imagery and music tend to surface what a person already knows and hasn't yet said out loud, and we work from there.
- First- and second-generation immigrants navigating more than one culture.
- People of color managing what goes unnamed in their workplace.
- People reconsidering a career or a direction they no longer want.
Getting started
A free twenty-minute consultation by phone or video. You don't need to have it organized into an account first.