Licensed Psychologist
“A psychologist for people whose stories don’t fit on a checklist”
My practice covers three connected areas: depth-focused, insight-oriented psychotherapy, forensically focused psychological evaluations for immigration matters, and comprehensive psychological assessment for complex diagnostic presentations. They look different on the surface, but the underlying work is one thing. Most of it begins where the easy answers run out.
What I bring to that is doctoral training, careful clinical formulation, and a willingness to sit with complexity rather than reach for the nearest label. The goal isn’t a faster answer. It is an accurate one, and a record of that understanding that’s useful to the people relying on it.
44 U.S. states + territories
Currently accepting
Focus areas
My practice is often built around the situations below. You may recognize yourself in one or more of them:
01
Adults pursuing depth-oriented therapy: for attachment wounds, emotionally unavailable parents, and relational patterns that haven’t shifted with time or surface-level work.
02
Immigration applicants and the attorneys representing them: who need a forensically-focused psychological evaluation for asylum, hardship, VAWA, U Visa, T Visa, or related matters.
03
People pursuing comprehensive psychological assessment after years of misdiagnosis, mixed answers, or symptoms that have never quite added up.
04
Women and girls seeking careful evaluation for autism or ADHD, particularly when the presentation has been masked, internalized, or missed by other providers.
05
Neurodivergent and gifted adults navigating masking, burnout, and the experience of feeling different in a world that wasn’t built for them.
Services
Three connected practice areas. Each has its own page with full process and fee detail; the sections below describe how I approach each one.
Depth-focused, attachment-oriented psychotherapy for adults working with relational patterns, trauma, and what lies beneath the surface.
Best fit for adults whose prior therapy stayed at the surface.
Read more ↓
Forensically focused psychological evaluations for asylum, hardship, VAWA, U Visa, T Visa, and related immigration matters.
Best fit for applicants who need a thorough psychological evaluation.
Read more ↓
Comprehensive psychological assessment for adults with complex or longstanding diagnostic questions.
Best fit for those seeking diagnostic clarity after years of incomplete answers.
Read more ↓
Practice area
Some answers aren’t on the surface
Many of the people I work with in therapy arrive knowing something isn’t working, and not yet sure why. The same patterns keep surfacing in different relationships. A persistent sense of being “too much,” or not enough. Difficulty trusting closeness, or difficulty trusting that they can leave it. Years of earlier work that helped at the time, but didn’t reach the layer underneath.
My approach is psychodynamic and attachment-focused. That means the work is built around understanding: how a person came to feel and respond the way they do, what was met and what was missed in the relationships that formed them, what their emotional history is asking for now that it didn’t get then. Symptoms are taken seriously, but they are usually signals of something deeper, and the change that holds tends to come from understanding the deeper thing rather than from managing what shows up on the surface.
This is slower than brief models, and it asks for a willingness to sit with what surfaces rather than route around it. In return, it tends to reach the patterns at their root rather than at their edges. Many of the people I see have tried therapy before, sometimes more than once, and come looking for someone willing to go further, hold what’s complicated, and help them develop the emotional understanding and capacity they did not consistently receive earlier in life.
Schedule a free fifteen-minute consultation to discuss working together in therapy.
Practice area
Forensic depth, prepared with the care these cases deserve
People come to an immigration evaluation carrying some of the most difficult experiences a person can carry: persecution, war, displacement, trafficking, family violence, or the prospect of being separated from people they love. Discussing these experiences can be hard. My job is to make it as careful and humane as that material deserves while producing the kind of evaluation the legal process actually requires.
These are forensically focused psychological evaluations, conducted as independent clinical assessments. Each one involves a comprehensive clinical interview, trauma-informed pacing, attention to cultural and linguistic context, certified medical interpreters when needed, and structured documentation grounded in current best practices in forensic psychology and asylum medicine.
This work is grounded in doctoral-level training in clinical psychology, with particular depth in psychological assessment, differential diagnosis, and clinical formulation. I have extensive additional training focused on immigration evaluation, including coursework through Palo Alto University and the Asylum Medicine Training Initiative. I am also a member of the Physicians for Human Rights Asylum Network.
I conduct evaluations for asylum (I-589), hardship waivers (I-601 and I-601A), VAWA, U Visa, T Visa, and other immigration matters. Each report is structured to meet the specific forensic and evidentiary requirements of the case it serves, with audiences including applicants, attorneys, USCIS adjudicators, and immigration courts. Evaluations are conducted by telehealth across the United States.
See our immigration evaluations page for the full process, fees, and form-specific information.
Schedule a free fifteen-minute consultation to discuss your case.
Practice area
Not just a label, but an explanation
Most people pursuing a comprehensive psychological assessment have been carrying some form of diagnostic uncertainty for years, sometimes decades. Different providers have reached different conclusions. Symptoms have been treated without the underlying picture ever being clearly understood. Earlier evaluations may have answered one question but missed several others. By the time someone arrives here, the goal is usually less about a label and more about an actual explanation.
Comprehensive psychological assessment is a specialized area of doctoral-level psychological practice. Each evaluation is built around a process integrating clinical interview, validated psychological testing, developmental and medical history review, and collateral information, interpreted together rather than in pieces. The orientation throughout is diagnostic clarification: examining what fits, what doesn’t, what overlaps, and what’s been missed, rather than confirming a single label that’s already been suggested.
This kind of evaluation is best suited to complex or longstanding presentations. The work routinely includes cases involving trauma, dissociation, mood instability, complex personality functioning, psychosis-spectrum questions, neurodevelopmental differences such as autism and ADHD, and the longstanding diagnostic uncertainty that comes from years of incomplete or conflicting answers. Many clients arrive on referral from a therapist or another psychologist who has recognized that the picture warrants more than a brief screening can provide.
The intake and feedback sessions are conducted by telehealth; the testing days are in person. Reports integrate every source of data into a single clinical formulation, written to be useful to the person being evaluated, to their treatment team, and to anyone the report needs to communicate with going forward.
Schedule a free fifteen-minute consultation to talk through your situation.
Approach
A disposition, not a method
Therapy, immigration evaluations, and comprehensive assessment may look different on the surface, but the underlying disposition is the same.
Depth over surface.
The work is built on the assumption that what shows up, whether a symptom, a relational pattern, a diagnostic question, or a chapter of someone’s history, is usually a signal of something further back. The clinical task is to understand the further-back thing, not just to address the visible one. This is true whether the deliverable is a course of therapy, a forensic report, or a diagnostic formulation.
Diagnostic humility.
Symptoms can have multiple explanations. Trauma can look like personality functioning. Autism in adults can look like anxiety, depression, or social difficulty. ADHD can look like trauma-related dysregulation or bipolar disorder. The work takes time to consider what fits and what doesn’t before drawing conclusions, and is willing to revise an early impression when the data ask for it.
Trauma in its full context.
Trauma is not only a set of symptoms; it is something shaped by relationships, family systems, culture, occupation, displacement, and the specifics of a person’s life. My training and clinical experience have spanned interpersonal, occupational, and geo-politically grounded forms of trauma, and that breadth shapes how each individual case is approached.
What “comprehensive” actually means.
Comprehensive psychological work is defined less by the number of sessions or pages than by what is integrated: clinical interview, history, multiple lines of evidence, careful formulation, and the willingness to sit with complexity rather than route around it. That standard applies whether I am writing a report, conducting an evaluation, or working with someone in therapy over time.
These dispositions are slower than briefer models. They are also, in the cases that come to this practice, what tends to actually help.
Going Deeper
For readers who want to go further, here are some of the threads that run through my work and the populations and contexts I have particular experience with. Open any panel that’s relevant to you.
Many of the people who arrive in therapy are not struggling with a single problem. They are noticing patterns. The same dynamic surfaces in romantic relationships, in family relationships, in friendships, sometimes at work: different people, but a familiar shape. A pull toward closeness paired with the fear of being engulfed by it. Or a longing for closeness paired with the suspicion that it isn’t safe. Or both, depending on the day.
These patterns rarely come from nowhere. They tend to be shaped by the relationships that formed us, particularly the early ones, before we had words for what was happening or what was missing. A parent may have been physically present but emotionally unavailable. A caregiver may have been loving but inconsistent, or attentive but anxious, or warm but unable to tolerate certain feelings. In adulthood, what was met or missed in those early relationships often shows up not as memory but as pattern: how we read other people, what we expect from them, what we ask for and what we go without, what we can let in and what we can’t.
My therapeutic work focuses on these layers carefully and over time. The aim is not to assign blame, and not to dwell in the past for its own sake. It is to understand the patterns clearly enough that they begin to loosen, and to help the person develop the emotional understanding, internal resources, and self-trust they did not consistently receive earlier in life. That can mean learning what it actually feels like to be in connection without losing yourself, or to hold a boundary without abandoning the relationship, or to ask for what you need without bracing for the consequences. It usually means developing a more compassionate internal voice than the one a person grew up with.
This is slower work than skill-based or symptom-focused therapy. It tends to suit people who are willing to sit with what surfaces, and who sense that the answers they are looking for are not on the surface.
Trauma is not only a set of symptoms. It is shaped by the relationships, family systems, occupations, cultures, and political and historical conditions a person has lived inside. Two people can carry experiences that look similar on paper and have entirely different inner lives because of what surrounded those experiences: what was named, what was hidden, who was believed, what was possible to recover from and what was not. Careful trauma work has to take that surrounding context seriously, not as background detail but as part of the clinical picture.
My experience spans several kinds of trauma that the field too often treats as separate specialties.
Interpersonal and relational trauma: abuse, neglect, family violence, loss of safety in early relationships, the long aftermath of being unseen in formative ones.
Occupational and combat-related trauma: work that began with clinical work with veterans at the Lowell Vet Center and continued through my doctoral dissertation on stress and stress management among firefighters, and that informs how I sit with people whose roles ask them to carry responsibility, exposure, and moral weight that the rest of us don’t see.
Trauma rooted in displacement and political violence: the experiences I most often encounter in immigration evaluations, including persecution, war, trafficking, and forced migration, and including the cultural and linguistic context that these experiences cannot be separated from.
Complex and developmental trauma: the effects of trauma that began early or recurred across years, often woven into how a person came to understand themselves and other people.
These contexts are different, and it matters that they are. A veteran’s relationship to trauma is not the same as a survivor of childhood neglect’s, which is not the same as an asylum applicant’s, which is not the same as a survivor of intimate partner violence’s. The clinical work is shaped accordingly. What is consistent across them is the approach: careful formulation that takes the surrounding context as part of the case, attention to what trauma cannot be separated from in a particular person’s life, and the willingness to sit with what is heavy rather than to look away from it.
Some roles ask a person to absorb the things the rest of us look away from: to make decisions inside fear, to stay functional inside grief, to carry exposure to suffering, danger, or moral complexity that does not stop when the shift ends. Veterans, firefighters, paramedics, police officers, emergency physicians, attorneys handling cases of harm, and others in roles structured this way often arrive in therapy carrying experiences that are difficult to put into words. The experiences themselves resist easy language, and the people in their lives often do not have the framework to receive them.
Some of what these clients carry shows up as classic post-traumatic symptoms: intrusion, hypervigilance, sleep difficulty, the body still running protocols the mind would prefer to set down. Other parts of it show up differently. Moral injury, the specific kind of harm that comes from witnessing, participating in, or failing to prevent acts that violate one’s deepest moral commitments, is often the part that brief trauma frameworks miss. It is not the same as PTSD. It involves grief, guilt, shame, and a loss of trust in one’s own goodness, and it cannot be treated as if it were a fear response. Cumulative exposure, the slow accretion of difficult cases or calls or watches over years, is another part that doesn’t fit cleanly into a single-event framework. So is the disorienting return to civilian or off-duty life, where the things one learned to do under pressure become hard to explain or set aside.
My clinical work with this population began during my doctoral training, at the Vet Center in Lowell, Massachusetts, working with veterans across multiple combat eras on combat-related trauma, military sexual trauma, and reintegration. My doctoral dissertation focused on stress and stress management among firefighters. I have continued working with veterans, first responders, and others in high-responsibility roles since, and that experience shapes how I sit with what they bring: without flinching, without sentimentalizing, and without expecting them to translate their experience into a register that doesn’t fit it.
What this audience tends to need is a clinician who can hear the actual material at the actual register, hold what is hard to hold, and work with the specific texture of moral and occupational weight rather than translating it into a more generic clinical frame. That is what I aim to provide.
Many adults arrive at psychological assessment hoping for a clean answer to a question that has been sitting unresolved for years. What is actually going on with me? Why has nothing I have tried fully fit? They want what is sometimes called diagnostic clarification, and that is a reasonable thing to want. The work of producing it, however, is more complicated than the field’s marketing usually suggests, and the difference between a casual answer and an accurate one matters in real and lasting ways.
Diagnostic clarification is the careful work of understanding what is actually happening for a person. It involves considering all the conditions that could plausibly explain what someone is experiencing, examining the evidence for and against each, and reaching a conclusion the data actually support. In real lives, symptoms rarely arrive looking like the clean, single-condition examples in a diagnostic manual. Conditions overlap. Conditions imitate each other. Conditions co-occur. Some examples that come up routinely in my work: trauma can present in ways that closely resemble personality difficulties; autism in adults can present as anxiety, depression, social struggle, or a personality presentation; ADHD can present as trauma-related dysregulation, or vice versa; dissociation can be mistaken for psychosis; bipolar disorder can be confused with mood instability rooted in trauma. A brief evaluation that does not have time to weigh these alternatives can land on a diagnosis that does not quite fit, and that incorrect diagnosis can shape years of subsequent treatment in the wrong direction.
This is where the disposition I think of as diagnostic humility becomes important. What I mean by the term is the willingness to take time, before drawing conclusions, to consider what fits, what does not fit, what overlaps, and what may have been missed in earlier evaluations. It is the opposite of the posture that begins with a diagnosis already in mind and looks for evidence to confirm it. In a comprehensive psychological assessment, diagnostic humility is what the structured interview time, the multiple sources of data, the integrated formulation, and the carefully written report are for. It is built into the process.
Diagnostic humility is not the same as diagnostic uncertainty. The aim is not to avoid conclusions; it is to reach the right ones, and to be honest about the difference between a clinical impression that has been carefully tested against the alternatives and one that has not.
Many of the people who arrive at psychological assessment are not looking for just a label. They are looking for an explanation: a real understanding of why their life has felt the way it has, why prior treatment has fit imperfectly, why their experience has been hard to put into words. Accurate clarification can be one of the most meaningful things a person receives about themselves. It can reframe years of confusion. It can change how someone makes sense of their history, their relationships, their patterns, and what is and is not possible for them. The work is built to provide that, grounded in a deeper understanding of who they are.
Psychological assessment is a phrase that covers a wide range of services: brief screening tools that take a single session, short rating-scale-based evaluations, and multi-day comprehensive assessments that integrate several lines of clinical evidence. These are not the same kind of work, and they are not designed to answer the same kinds of questions. The variation in what is offered under the term psychological assessment is one of the reasons clients and referring clinicians sometimes encounter very different answers to similar diagnostic questions.
A comprehensive psychological assessment, as I conduct it, is structured around several hours of clinical interview, a carefully selected battery of validated psychological tests, a thorough developmental and psychiatric history, review of prior records when available, and collateral information from people in the client’s life. The instruments used vary by case. Autism evaluation, ADHD evaluation, complex diagnostic clarification, and trauma-related questions all draw on different testing batteries, but the principle is consistent: multiple sources of data, considered together. The clinical formulation is built across the full process. The written report is not a summary of test scores. It is an integrated account of the person, the question being asked, the data that bear on it, and the most accurate clinical picture the data support.
Briefer screening models can be appropriate for narrower questions: straightforward presentations, focused diagnostic questions, situations where a single dimension of functioning is at issue. They are not designed for the complex diagnostic questions that arise when multiple conditions may be co-occurring or masking each other, or when the picture has remained unclear over time. When those features are present, the brief format reaches its limits, and the result tends to be either a surface-level answer or a diagnosis that doesn’t quite fit. Many of the clients who arrive at comprehensive assessment have already been through one or more of the briefer formats and are arriving precisely because the answer they received didn’t fully account for what was happening.
For referring clinicians, what this practice provides is an evaluation built for the cases where careful diagnostic clarification is the actual clinical task, including cases where prior assessment has already been completed and the picture is still unclear. The report is written to inform the referring clinician, not just the client, and to function as a working document for treatment decisions over time.
Neurodivergence is not a disorder of the person; it is a difference in how a brain is built. The term covers a range of presentations, including autism, ADHD, OCD, bipolar disorder, giftedness, and the many ways these can co-occur in a single person. What these share is that they describe a neurotype: the particular pattern of how a person’s brain processes information, attention, sensation, emotion, and the social world. Some neurotypes are common; others are less so. Approached well, the clinical work is not about correcting a person’s neurotype. It is about helping someone live more sustainably and more authentically inside the one they have.
The reason so many neurodivergent adults arrive at therapy or assessment exhausted is not that the neurodivergence itself is the problem. It is that the cost of trying to function in environments that weren’t built for one’s neurotype compounds over time. Some of the clearest names for this pattern come from autism and ADHD experience. Masking, the practice of suppressing one’s natural responses, expressions, sensory needs, or social style in order to pass as neurotypical, works for a while, sometimes for decades. Then it stops working. Autistic burnout and ADHD burnout describe the result: profound depletion, sometimes accompanied by skill regression, sensory overload, and a sense of having lost access to oneself. Similar patterns of accumulated exhaustion appear across the broader landscape of neurodivergence. Years of being misread, underestimated, over-explained to, or asked to perform at someone else’s pace can leave a person with deep self-doubt that has nothing to do with their actual capacities.
For neurodivergent adults who are clear on their identity, what I offer in therapy is depth-oriented work that does not require translating yourself first. The goal is not adjustment to a world that hasn’t accommodated you; it is sustainability, self-trust, and the development of a relationship with yourself that does not run on suppression. For adults who suspect they may be neurodivergent but have never been formally evaluated, including people whose neurodivergence was missed or misread for years, what I offer in assessment is a careful, comprehensive evaluation that takes the question seriously and produces an answer worth trusting.
There is a particular subset of clients I see often: adults who are both gifted and neurodivergent, sometimes described as twice-exceptional. These presentations can be especially difficult to recognize, because high cognitive capacity often masks the underlying difficulty long enough that the person reaches adulthood with no diagnostic clarity at all. The work is built to recognize what is actually happening rather than to mistake compensation for ease.
The diagnostic frameworks for autism and ADHD were largely developed by studying boys and men, and the clinical literature is still catching up to how these conditions actually look in women and girls. The result is a generation of women who reached adulthood without an accurate diagnostic picture, sometimes after years of being told they had anxiety, depression, a personality issue, or nothing in particular at all. Many of them suspected something else was going on long before any clinician took the question seriously.
In women, autism often looks more internalized than externalized. Special interests can present as a deep, sustained focus that simply gets folded into school or career. Sensory difficulty can present as exhaustion, withdrawal, or chronic overstimulation that is read as introversion. Social difficulty can be hidden by careful study of how other people behave: watching, copying, rehearsing, masking. The effort of doing so eventually produces burnout that gets diagnosed as depression. ADHD in women shows up similarly, often without the externalized pattern that diagnostic frameworks were built to recognize. The inattentive presentation, the executive functioning difficulty, the rejection sensitivity, the time-blindness, and the lifelong sense of underperforming relative to one’s apparent capacity are often dismissed as personality features or character flaws rather than recognized as a clinical picture.
The result, for many women who arrive at assessment, is a long history of self-doubt. They have wondered whether they are imagining the difficulty, whether they are exaggerating, whether their problems are simply who they are. Some have raised the question with previous providers and been waved off. Others have not raised it because they assumed they would be.
What I offer is a careful, current, well-structured evaluation that takes the question seriously, considers the conditions that can present similarly or co-occur (including trauma, anxiety, mood, and personality presentations), and produces an answer the person can rely on: autism, ADHD, both, neither, or something the question turned out to be pointing at all along.
For immigration attorneys, what I aim to provide is a careful, independent psychological evaluation conducted at the standard the legal process requires. That involves comprehensive interview work, trauma-informed pacing, certified medical interpreters when needed, attention to cultural and linguistic context, and a written report appropriate to its audiences (USCIS adjudicators, immigration judges, and the case as a whole). I work with many types of immigration matters and am familiar with the procedural and evidentiary contexts in which these reports operate.
For referring clinicians, what I provide is comprehensive psychological assessment for the cases where careful diagnostic clarification is the actual task, including cases where prior assessment has already been completed and the picture is still unclear, cases involving complex or co-occurring presentations, and cases where the diagnostic question has implications for treatment direction. I welcome clinician-to-clinician communication about the referral, both at intake and after the report is delivered, when that’s helpful for the client’s continuing care.
For both audiences, the most efficient way to begin is the contact form on this site. A consultation can be arranged after that initial exchange when the case calls for it. Standard intake practices around scope, documentation, scheduling, and fees apply across all professional referrals; specific arrangements can be discussed at first contact.
Journalists, podcast hosts, fellow clinicians writing about the field, and others making professional inquiries are welcome to reach out via the contact form as well.
A consultation is the most direct way to discuss your situation. If you’d prefer to begin in writing, the contact form goes to the practice and reaches me promptly.
Beyond the practice
A brief note on professional activity outside the clinical work itself.
I am the co-host, with Cynthia Shaw, Psy.D., of Minds Over Chatter, a forthcoming podcast that explores meaning, mortality, and the harder questions of human existence. These are the kind of conversations that don’t have clean answers and benefit from being had anyway. Episodes are in production; the show site is at mindsoverchatterpodcast.com.
I am also a member of Physicians for Human Rights, an international organization that mobilizes health professionals to document and challenge mass atrocities and severe human rights violations. My affiliation is with their Asylum Network, the program that connects clinicians to attorneys and applicants in need of forensic evaluation in asylum and related immigration cases.
My work and clinical perspective have been referenced in coverage by The Guardian, Forbes, and New England Psychologist.
Background
Doctorate. Psy.D. in Clinical Psychology, Antioch University New England, 2018.
Licensure. Licensed Psychologist in New Hampshire and New York. Authorized to practice telehealth across forty-four U.S. states and territories under PSYPACT, the interstate compact that enables licensed psychologists to practice remotely across participating jurisdictions.
Internship. APA-accredited predoctoral internship at La Frontera Arizona, 2017-2018.
Antioch University New England
Antioch University New England
University of New Hampshire
Member #99085740
Credentialed Member #71299
E-Passport
Authority to Practice Interjurisdictional Telepsychology #8847
Where I practice. Telehealth across 44 U.S. states and territories under PSYPACT, plus full in-person and telehealth practice in New Hampshire and New York.
* Comprehensive psychological assessment (multi-day diagnostic testing service) is not offered in Pennsylvania. Therapy and immigration evaluations remain available.
The Next Step
Whatever brought you to this page, whether a question that hasn’t been answered, a story that hasn’t been fully heard, or a clinical picture that has been carried unclear for too long, careful psychological work begins by sitting with what’s actually there.
If you would like to discuss whether my practice is the right fit for what you’re navigating, I invite you to schedule a free fifteen-minute consultation. The conversation is the same regardless of whether you’re considering therapy, an immigration evaluation, or a comprehensive assessment: we discuss your situation, I describe how the work would proceed, and you decide.
Let’s help you name the unnameable.
For attorneys, referring clinicians, journalists, and others making professional inquiries, or for prospective clients whose situation is best discussed in writing first, the contact form is here.