Health at Every Size® Healthcare Provider Listing

My primary goal in therapy is to create a safe space for clients to understand and accept themselves more fully and to feel understood and accepted by the important people in their lives. It is amazing what positive changes people can make when they feel safe and comfortable enough to explore themselves and their problems with another person. I use elements of psychodynamic, humanistic, and cognitive behavioral therapies and work from an intersectional feminist lens. Issues of culture, bias, and marginalization run throughout my therapeutic work. For me, practicing from a HAES perspective is important for the same reasons that recognizing homophobia, transphobia, sexism, racism, and ableism is important: addressing oppression is critical to healing. For fat people, weight stigma is often a central source of psychological pain and trauma, and any therapeutic treatment that neglects to address it will be fundamentally incomplete. For some patients, this can take the form of acknowledging and dismantling internalized fat-phobia or processing a painful experience with weight-based bullying (often from a partner or family member). For others, addressing weight stigma can simply mean having a therapist who treats their body size as a neutral fact instead of a problem needing to be solved.