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 and anxiety
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
Recovering from a difficult relationship
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.
- 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.
04
Relationship patterns
People 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.
I also work with people in intercultural and interracial relationships, where there are real differences in assumptions about family obligation, money, conflict and privacy that rarely get named directly.
- Where a pattern began, and what it was originally protecting.
- Fear of abandonment that doesn't respond to reassurance.
- Expectations absorbed from family or culture that were never agreed to.
05
Identity and life direction
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.
06
Grief and loss
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.
Getting started
A free twenty-minute consultation by phone or video. You don't need to have it organized into an account first.