I grew up in a home shaped by high expectations and emotional unpredictability.

My father was intelligent and demanding, with moods that could shift quickly. My mother, stretched thin, was often emotionally unavailable. I learned early to read the room — to anticipate tension, to adjust, to shrink when needed.

That kind of environment teaches you how to survive relationships — but not always how to feel safe in them.

With undiagnosed ADD and English as my second language, I struggled in school and was often underestimated. In a family where achievement felt tied to worth, I quietly absorbed the belief: something is wrong with me.

So I went inward.
Art and reading books became my refuge — places where I could feel capable, expansive, and momentarily free from the pressure of not being
enough. Growing up between cultures deepened the sense of not quite belonging anywhere. I became observant, adaptive, and attuned to others — but disconnected from myself.

As an adult, these patterns followed me into relationships. I longed for stability and safe love, yet struggled to feel secure when I had it.

My search for belonging, freedom, intensity, and relief led me into many different worlds — including experiences with addiction and hard drug use, arrest and house arrest, open relationships and polyamory, kink communities, sex work, and high-control cultic environments.

Over time, I came to understand that many of these experiences were connected to deeper questions around attachment, identity, shame, worth, and the longing to feel fully alive and accepted.

Because of this, clients rarely have to worry about shocking me with the realities of their lives. I understand how intelligent, self-aware people can still find themselves pulled into painful, confusing, or self-destructive patterns while trying to meet very human needs for connection, meaning, safety, or escape.

After a painful divorce brought everything to the surface, I began asking different questions:

• How do I distinguish between healthy adaptability and people pleasing?
• Why do I trust intensity more than consistency?
• How do I take responsibility for my impact without collapsing into blame or shame?

Through intensive inner work — confronting perfectionism, attachment anxiety, shame, and the belief that love had to be earned — I slowly built something different. I learned to tolerate steadiness. To stay present when intimacy felt unfamiliar. To recognize that safety does not require constant bracing.

The work was not about becoming perfect. It was about becoming coherent.

Rather than erase my past, I chose to integrate it. 

Today, as a second-generation Chinese American therapist, I help people understand the patterns they’re caught in — not as personal failures, but as adaptive strategies shaped by earlier experiences.

My work integrates trauma-informed therapy, attachment repair, and mindfulness-based practices. I pay close attention to how a person’s nervous system responds in moments of conflict, and how those responses interact to create cycles of disconnection or closeness. 

Real change begins when we find the courage to see ourselves clearly — and the compassion to meet ourselves with grace.

Therapy with me is not about fixing what’s broken. It’s about helping you reconnect to who you were before your survival patterns set in – so that you can step into your life with greater ease, confidence, and wholeness.