Looking for a therapist in california?

Not all therapy is created equal. And not all therapists are trained to go where it hurts.

If you’re searching for a psychoanalytic or psychodynamic therapist in Sacramento, you may already know: you’re not looking for someone to “fix” you.

You’re looking for someone who can help you understand yourself—deeply, symbolically, in layers.

- Someone who can hold complexity.
- Someone who won’t flinch when things get raw.

But how do you know who’s qualified? What should you be looking for?

Let’s break it down.

Look for Depth, Not Just Degrees

Many therapists have master’s degrees. Fewer have steeped themselves in analytic theory.

A strong psychodynamic clinician may not be a formally trained psychoanalyst, but they’ve often immersed themselves in depth psychology through ongoing education, supervision, personal therapy, and independent study.

Ask:

• “Do you work from a psychodynamic or psychoanalytic perspective?”

• “How do you think about the unconscious or early childhood dynamics in therapy?”

• “What kind of influences shape your work?”

You’re looking for someone who doesn’t just reference theory, but works from it. Feels with it.

Expect a Focus on Process Over Protocol

If you’re used to therapy that feels like a checklist, this will feel different.

Psychodynamic work isn’t driven by worksheets or progress trackers. It’s about process. The slow emergence of meaning. The accumulation of insight over time.

If you’re seeking this kind of work in Sacramento, look for therapists who describe their practice in terms of curiosity, symbolism, emotional truth, or relational depth - not just goals and outcomes.

We’re not measuring your life in symptom reduction. We’re listening for what your life is trying to say.

The Right Therapist Doesn’t Promise to Make You Feel Better

At least not right away.

They help you feel more - which is different.

A good psychodynamic therapist will help you sit with discomfort, trace its lineage, and understand what it’s protecting. They won’t rush to soothe it. They won’t pathologize your pain. They’ll help you metabolize it.

That’s the difference between coping and healing.

Trust Your Gut - Then Ask Questions

Therapy is intimate work. If you don’t feel a sense of trust, safety, and curiosity in the first few sessions, speak up—or keep looking.

Ask yourself:

• Do I feel emotionally safe here?

• Am I being challenged in a way that feels respectful?

• Is this therapist listening to what I say, but also what I don’t say?

You don’t have to know right away. But something in you will. And it’s okay to listen.

Looking for a Psychodynamic Therapist in Sacramento?

I’m a psychodynamic psychotherapist based in Midtown Sacramento and available for telehealth throughout California. I’m also a psychoanalytic scholar - deeply immersed in the theory, literature, and clinical sensibility that shapes this work.

The Real Trip Starts After

The mushrooms didn't heal you.

They showed you what needs healing.

Psychedelic experiences - whether from clinical trials, ceremonial settings, or personal exploration - can crack something open.

But the real work happens afterward, in the slow translation of insight into lived change.

Most integration therapy focuses on making meaning of the experience itself.

• What did you see?

• What did you learn?

• How can you apply those insights to your daily life?

That's useful, but it’s not a psychodynamic approach to the work.

Psychodynamic integration starts from a different question: What psychological patterns got activated during your experience, and how do those patterns show up in the rest of your life?

Beyond Set and Setting

"Set and setting" - your mindset and environment - shape psychedelic experiences.

Your psyche doesn't just observe the experience - it creates it.

The visions you had, the emotions that surfaced, the particular fears or insights that emerged - none of that was random.

Your psyche used the altered state to communicate something it's been trying to tell you for years.

Maybe you experienced profound connection and realized how isolated you've been.

Maybe you encountered terrifying dissolution and recognized your desperate need for control.

Maybe you felt unconditional love, and understood how harshly you've been treating yourself.

These aren't just effects of the substance you took.

They're psychological material surfacing under different conditions.

Psychodynamic integration treats your psychedelic experience as a dream might be treated in therapy - rich symbolic material that reveals unconscious patterns, conflicts, and longings.

The Therapeutic Relationship as Integration Space

Here's what I notice: how someone talks about their psychedelic experience often mirrors their psychological defenses.

Some clients intellectualize everything - turning mystical encounters into philosophical frameworks - spiritual experiences into self-help strategies.

Others romanticize the experience, treating it as the solution to problems that actually require sustained psychological work.

Others are simply masters at spiritual bypassing.

The therapy relationship becomes a place to notice these patterns.

• How do you protect yourself from difficult feelings?

• What do you do when insight threatens to change something fundamental about how you live?

Your relationship to integration - whether you resist it, rush it, or try to control it - reveals the same psychological patterns that shape your relationships with people.

What the Unconscious Shows You

Psychedelic experiences often involve encounters with parts of yourself you don't usually access.

The harsh inner critic appears as a demonic figure.

The grieving child shows up as overwhelming sadness.

The wise, integrated self emerges as light, love, or cosmic connection.

In psychodynamic work, we explore these encounters as projections of internal psychological material. Not to reduce them to "just" psychology, but to understand what your psyche was communicating through symbol and metaphor.

That terrifying shadow figure? It might represent aspects of yourself you've been disowning.

The divine light? It could be your innate capacity for self-compassion finally breaking through defenses.

The goal isn't to interpret your experience away.

It's to understand what it's pointing toward.

Family Ghosts in Altered States

Psychedelic experiences often activate family-of-origin material in unexpected ways.

You might encounter your father's rage, your mother's anxiety, or generational trauma you didn't know you were carrying.

You might experience yourself as the hurt child you once were, or feel the weight of expectations you never chose.

Sometimes people have breakthrough experiences of self-love, only to discover afterward that they have no idea how to sustain that feeling in relationships shaped by early patterns of criticism or neglect.

Psychodynamic integration helps you understand how family dynamics show up in altered states, and how they continue to show up in your daily life.

The Integration That Doesn't Integrate

Not everything from a psychedelic experience is meant to be integrated into ordinary consciousness.

Some insights are too large for everyday life.

Some spiritual experiences can't be translated into practical action.

Some emotional releases need to happen without becoming life strategies.

But here's what does need integrating: the psychological patterns that the experience revealed.

If you discovered how defended you are against vulnerability, that's workable in therapy.

If you realized how much shame you carry about your needs, that's psychological material to explore.

If you encountered your capacity for unconditional self-acceptance, that's a relationship to develop over time.

Psychodynamic integration focuses on sustainable psychological change rather than trying to recreate peak experiences.

The Long View of Consciousness Change

Real integration takes years, not months.

Psychedelic experiences can catalyze psychological work, but they don't do the work itself. The insights need to be lived, practiced, and integrated into your actual relationships and life circumstances.

This is where psychodynamic therapy excels.

Instead of focusing on the dramatic moments of breakthrough, we focus on the subtle, ongoing work of changing unconscious patterns.

What This Looks Like in Practice

You might find yourself exploring:

• What psychological material surfaced during your experience, and how does that material show up in your relationships?

• What defenses did the experience challenge, and how do you protect yourself in everyday life?

• What family patterns got activated, and how do those patterns limit your current relationships?

• What insights felt transformative in the moment, and what's preventing you from living them now?

• How do you relate to altered states of consciousness, and what does that reveal about your relationship to surrender, control, or the unknown?

• How do you feel about spirituality now?

We're not trying to recreate your psychedelic experience.

We're trying to understand what it revealed about your psychological landscape, and how to work with that landscape more consciously.

When Integration Meets Resistance

Sometimes the biggest barrier to integration isn't lack of insight - it's unconscious resistance to change.

Your psychedelic experience might have shown you exactly what needs to shift in your life.

But actually making those changes threatens psychological patterns that have been protecting you for decades.

Psychodynamic work helps you understand, and work through this resistance rather than trying to override it with spiritual bypassing or forced positivity.

Because real integration isn't about becoming the person your psychedelic experience showed you.

It's about becoming more conscious of who you actually are…including the parts that resist growth, fear change, and prefer familiar suffering to unknown freedom.

In my Sacramento practice, I work with clients who want to honor their psychedelic experiences without making them into something they're not.

These experiences can be profound catalysts for psychological work, but they're not shortcuts to emotional maturity.

The real magic happens in the slow, sustained work of bringing unconscious patterns into consciousness - whether those patterns got revealed through psilocybin, ayahuasca, clinical ketamine, MDMA, DMT, LSD, holotropic breathing, or just the ordinary altered state of deep therapy.

Because consciousness change isn't an event.

It's a practice.

This kind of therapy takes time

We live in a world that prizes speed. Fast relief. Instant results. Same-day delivery.

So it’s no surprise that many people come to therapy hoping for a fix. A formula. A timeline.

But psychodynamic therapy doesn’t move on a clock. It moves with the psyche.

And the psyche doesn’t care about your calendar.

Depth Can’t Be Rushed

You can’t hurry trust. You can’t schedule a breakthrough.

Psychodynamic therapy is rooted in the belief that change happens not just from insight, but from the experience of being seen over time. It’s not about giving you answers. It’s about helping you learn how to hear your own.

That takes time. Not because you’re slow. But because you’re complex.

Insight Isn’t a Lightbulb. It’s a Dimmer Switch.

Sometimes people say, “I already know where this comes from - why do I still feel stuck?”

Because intellectual insight isn’t the same as emotional integration.

In psychodynamic work, we return to patterns again and again - not to wallow, but to metabolize. To bring what’s unconscious into consciousness. To let the wound feel what it couldn’t feel before.

It’s less like flipping a switch and more like slowly turning up the light in a room you’ve been afraid to enter.

The Therapeutic Relationship Is the Treatment

In psychodynamic therapy, the relationship between therapist and patient isn’t just the backdrop - it’s the alchemical vessel.

Old relational patterns show up. Defenses emerge. Attachments play out.

And together, we work through them. Not just talk about them.

This process - called transference and countertransference - takes time to unfold. It’s sacred, messy, and deeply reparative when honored instead of rushed.

In Sacramento, Time Is Its Own Kind of Rebellion

In a city that’s both state-capital fast and river-town slow, therapy becomes a strange kind of rebellion.

To pause. To feel. To not optimize every hour for productivity. To show up each week and make space for the parts of you that don’t want to be seen.

That’s not avoidance. That’s healing.

Why the Long Haul Matters

You don’t undo a lifetime of conditioning in 6 sessions.

You don’t build self-trust overnight.

Psychodynamic therapy takes time because it honors your interior world. It’s not concerned with how quickly you can appear to be better. It’s concerned with what kind of relationship you’re building with yourself - and whether it can hold you when things fall apart again.

Because they will. That’s life. And therapy isn’t about avoiding rupture. It’s about increasing your capacity to move through it with grace, clarity, and a bit more choice.

Looking for a Psychodynamic Therapist in Sacramento?

If you’re drawn to depth, to insight, to work that unfolds slowly and intentionally - I’d be honored to walk with you. I see patients both in-person in Sacramento and via telehealth across California.

When you're ready, we can begin.

This is not CBT.

Psychodynamic therapy is not about quick fixes. It’s about going deeper—into memory, into meaning, into the patterns that live beneath our awareness but run the show.

If you’ve Googled “therapist in Sacramento,” chances are you've come across a buffet of modalities - CBT, EMDR, DBT, ACT. Acronyms promising solutions. Tools. Techniques.

But psychodynamic therapy doesn’t promise tools. It promises transformation.

So what is it, really? And how is it different from something like CBT?

Psychodynamic Therapy Isn’t Focused on Symptom Relief

CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is often structured, goal-oriented, and symptom-focused. It’s the therapy of to-do lists and thought records. For many, it works beautifully—especially for targeted issues like phobias or test anxiety.

But psychodynamic therapy isn’t interested in putting a Band-Aid on a festering wound.

It asks:

• Why is this wound here at all?

• Who taught you to keep reopening it?

• What part of you thinks you deserve it?

CBT may help you reframe the thought, but psychodynamic work invites you to feel the original pain, make sense of it, and let it move through—so you don’t keep living it out unconsciously.

It’s Not About Managing the Inner Critic. It’s About Meeting Them.

You can’t out-logic a voice that was never logical to begin with.

That part of you that says you’re not enough didn’t come from nowhere. It has a history. It has a tone. It sounds like someone. In psychodynamic work, we listen to that voice. We trace its roots. And slowly, we change the relationship—not just the message.

This isn’t about “fixing” your self-talk. It’s about understanding who you had to become in order to survive. And whether you still need to be that person.

The Unconscious

In psychodynamic therapy, we don’t just focus on what you know. We pay attention to what you almost said, the dream you had, the way your body tensed when we hit something close to home.

That’s the unconscious at work.

We all have an emotional history that lives inside us—shaping how we love, fight, retreat, and long. Psychodynamic therapy gives that history space to be seen.

And when we bring the unconscious into consciousness? That’s when real, lasting change begins.

The Work Takes Time - But It’s Built to Last

Quick relief is not the same as deep change.

CBT often runs 6–12 weeks. Psychodynamic therapy can take longer. Not because it’s slow, but because it honors the complexity of being human.

We are not spreadsheets.

We are not symptoms to be reduced.

We are stories—layered, symbolic, unfolding.

In Sacramento, where the pace of life can feel like a tug-of-war between burnout and stillness, there is something radical about going slow. About making space for what’s been pushed down.

Psychodynamic Therapy in Sacramento

If you’re searching for a psychodynamic therapist in Sacramento, you’re looking for someone who understands the depth of this work - who sees therapy not as advice-giving, but as a collaborative excavation of meaning.

Not every therapist practices this way. And not every patient is ready for it. But if you’ve tried surface-level approaches and found them lacking—this may be the next right door.

Ready to Begin?

I’m a psychodynamic psychotherapist based in Sacramento (I am available for telehealth anywhere in California), working with individuals who want something more than symptom relief. If you’re drawn to depth, meaning, and the slow unfolding of insight -I’d be honored to meet you there.

Ancestral fears

The hand that steadies you is also the one that wounds you.

A recent NYT piece suggests that therapy culture - our collective turn inward, toward diagnosis, language, trauma as currency - may be one reason Millennials (aka The Spice Girl Generation? [finger’s crossed that moniker sticks]) and Gen Z are having fewer children.

Not just because of money. Or climate. Or Roe.

But because we are fluent now in harm.

Because we’ve been trained to fear our inheritance.

And worse - our capacity to pass it on.

Therapy has changed how we name hurt.

We’ve gotten good at tracing pain backwards.

We fear becoming the very people who loved us in the only way they knew how — even if it wasn’t the way we needed.

It’s a compelling thesis. Also, a comfort.

Because it suggests that if we heal long enough, name things precisely enough, we might one day be safe to become parents.

Safe to love someone we might damage.

But I don’t think that kind of safety exists.

And I don’t think the answer is retreat. Or avoidance. Or narrating our suffering like it might save us.

Fear is not a problem we can solve with language.

Some things don’t get resolved.

They just get lived through.

If you’ve chosen not to have children because it’s right for your body, your life, your joy -I support you without hesitation.

This is about autonomy. Not obligation.

What I’m speaking to is something else:
The decision not to try.

Not because you don’t want to.

Because you’re afraid you’ll fail.

Because you believe brokenness disqualifies you from loving. From raising up.

Because you’ve mistaken the ache of being human for a personal defect.

But life will break you open no matter what.

You will hurt people you love.

You will be hurt by people who love you.

And parenting - if it finds you - will gut you in both directions.

That’s not failure.

That’s the deal.

We don’t parent because we’re whole.

Wholeness is a myth.

We parent because we are willing to be undone by something greater than ourselves.

What unsettles me most is not that we’re afraid of hurting the people we love.

Of course we are.

But that we’ve convinced ourselves we won’t survive it.

That feels like a child’s fantasy.

“You’re It!” Your fave childhood game (and adult coping mechanism)

When was the last time you called someone a narcissist?

Many of our loudest judgments - the quick disgust, the moral outrage, the eye-rolls, the “can you believe they...” - aren’t just about other people.

They’re about us.

Welcome to the shadow.

Jung taught that the shadow accusations we hurl at others are often confessions waiting to be made about ourselves.

The shadow refers to the parts of ourselves we repress, deny, or disown - usually because they conflict with the image we want to present to the world.

But disowning those parts doesn’t erase them. It just pushes them underground, where they begin to project.

So instead of owning envy, we call someone arrogant.

Instead of recognizing our own manipulations, we fixate on how controlling others are.

Instead of admitting our capacity for rage, we label someone toxic.

These accusations might not be wrong. But they’re rarely clean.

The shadow loves to hide behind righteousness.

Want to meet your shadow? Ask your ex.

Right now, shadow work is trending - all over TikTok, Instagram, and spiritual wellness spaces.

It’s being sold as a kind of DIY enlightenment: journal prompts, tarot spreads, inner child memes.

But here’s the truth: shadow work isn’t just a vibe. It’s an excavation.

And done without support, it can be destabilizing - even dangerous.

Because the shadow doesn’t show up in clear reflections.

It distorts, exaggerates, and resists being seen. It’s symbolic, slippery, and emotionally loaded.

This work - done well - requires containment. It needs space for contradiction, grief, nuance.

And often, it needs the presence of someone trained to hold those depths with you. A therapist. A guide.

So yes, be curious when judgment arises:

• Instead of:“They’re so fake” Try:“Where am I not being real?”

• Instead of:“They’re a narcissist” Try:“Where do I feel unseen or small in their presence?”

• Instead of:“They’re manipulative” Try:“Where am I bending truth to stay in control?”

You’re likely to meet a version of yourself you’ve never dared to look at - but always suspected was there, just beneath the surface.

And that is the beginning of living more consciously.

But not necessarily more comfortably.

Start slow. Go deep. And don’t go it alone.

Clarity in the Age of Algorithms

“The price of civilization is neurosis.” - Carl Jung 

We keep saying things are getting worse. 

That the world is more chaotic, more fractured, more fake than ever. 

But I don’t think that’s quite accurate.

What we’re experiencing is a loss of insulation - a dropping away of the illusion that the future would reward stability with more stability.

We’re in the age of algorithms - where every impulse is tracked and reflected back to us in distorted form. 

We know way too much about what everyone else is thinking!

We scroll through the entire archive of human civilization before breakfast. 

We were not built for this much input.

Algorithms isolate us into feedback loops that feel like reality, then make us wonder if we’re losing our minds. It’s chaos!

But chaos isn’t the exception. It’s the baseline. 

The myth that things were ever stable, orderly, or under control is a privilege of modernity. 

As if we were “over” surviving ourselves. 

As if we didn’t build cities on tectonic faults, economies on debt, and digital lives on surveillance engines. 

What’s crumbling isn’t reality - it’s the fantasy that we’d transcended our nature.

Jung suggested that civilization itself produces neurosis: the repression of instinct, the denial of death, the demand that we stay composed while the unconscious roils underneath. 

In many ways, this moment - glitchy, overwhelming, unspeakably strange - is a reckoning with that repression. 

The veils are lifting. We’re not more broken than we used to be - we’re just closer to the surface of things.

I think this is why so many people feel foggy, disoriented, and unmoored. 

Not because we’re descending into madness, but because we’re waking up inside a long-delayed honesty. 

It’s disorienting to live in a time where the stakes are exposed, the violence isn’t outsourced, and the contradictions are harder to rationalize away. 

But there’s also something clarifying in it. Something that reminds me I’m alive. Reminder: YOU ARE ALIVE RIGHT NOW.

The phone doesn’t cause the chaos - it accelerates our encounter with it. 

AI doesn’t invent unreality - it exaggerates the one we’ve built. 

We are not being ruined by the times. We’re being revealed by them.

And maybe that’s the work now. 

Not to restore a vanished normal, but to develop the capacity to live without the anesthesia. 

To be here, in this jagged, breathless moment, and not look away. 

Not to transcend our primate instincts, but to see them clearly, and choose differently.

The world has always been like this. 

Violent and beautiful. Terrible and tender. 

But maybe now, finally, it’s honest. 

And maybe, beneath the noise, we are too.

Loneliness Is Not a Symptom. It’s a Signal.

We’re told we’re in a loneliness epidemic - as if loneliness were a virus we caught from too much time alone.

But loneliness isn’t new. And it isn’t a flaw.

It’s a deeply human response to disconnection - from others, but also from ourselves.

There’s a kind of loneliness no amount of scrolling can touch.

It arrives quietly - between sips of tea, on the drive home, just after the book ends.

It’s not about being alone. It’s about a lack of resonance.

The sense that no one is quite with you, even when they’re around.

In a world built to distract you from yourself, that feeling gets labeled pathological.

But it’s not a symptom. It’s a signal.

Biologically, loneliness is a distress call. A primal urge for reconnection. 

The nervous system doesn’t distinguish between emotional isolation and physical threat - the brain codes both as danger. 

That tightening in your chest? It’s your body asking: Where is my pack?

Wolves howl to locate each other. 

A lone wolf isn’t powerful. It’s at risk.

Many of us are living like lone wolves now. 

Not by choice, but by design - cut off by culture, by trauma, by algorithms that replace communion with commentary.

In therapy, I often hear:

“I shouldn’t feel this lonely. I have people.”
“I don’t belong anywhere.”
“I can’t tell who I am when I’m with others.”

These aren’t just clinical patterns. They’re deep human truths.

We live in a culture that prizes performance over presence.

That mistakes constant contact for true connection.

So when loneliness shows up, it may not mean something’s wrong.

It may mean you’re coming into contact with what matters.

Loneliness often signals the end of pretending.

The point where performance gives way to longing.

Where the need for something real outweighs the comfort of the familiar.

That you're ready to be met, not just mirrored.

To connect, not just to cope.

That’s a good place to start. 

You’re Not Broken. You’re Becoming.

One of the best things you can do for the health of your plant is to stress it out. In order to be healthy, the plant must suffer at times.

Suffering grows humans too.

I’m not on TikTok or Instagram, but if those platforms are anything like they were when I left - there are still plenty of people hawking the Secret to Wholeness™.

There is no secret. But there is a trick. I’ll get to that.

There is no such thing as wholeness. Wholeness is a product sold by the health and wellness industry meant to make you feel you are broken and that the $79 pack of adaptogenic whatevers is JUST the thing to cure you of your malaise. Your ills. Your fatal flaws. 

There is growth, or there is death. And growth is stressful. And growth is ultimately fatal - all things must pass. 

Gardeners know the secret to a healthy bloom in springtime is to stress the fuck out of the plant coming out of dormancy. A plant’s natural lifecycle is one of dormancy, stress, growth, bloom, and decay. Each phase as necessary as the last.

As a psychotherapist I have seen many people who just want the quick fix answer to all that ails them (uh, me too). As a psychoanalytic scholar, and veritable expert on all strain of existential crisis I’m here to tell you that the best of us suffer intensely. 

The trick is - recognizing when you cannot hold it all on your own, and asking for help before suffering becomes your identity. 

The goal of therapy is not to disappear the pain, but rather, to so well-callous the hand that holds the pain, that suddenly the red-hot thing (traumatic memory, root pain, primal fear) is able to be held - and understood.

It’s only by going over and over and over again the painful bits… building up tolerance and consciousness… experiencing stressful growth bit by bit - that we earn the ability to move more consciously in our lives. To not be governed by the inner destructive forces that would keep us suffering in the dark.

That we finally earn our peace.

Gender Isn’t a Problem to Solve

The political arena in America has more in common with the failed spectacle of the Arena Football League than with the serious business of running government. So trust me when I say - I’m not here to contend with your belief system around who should and should not be in power. That’s for a political science geek, I’m a psychology geek.

But I am writing about power. 

Power thrives in the otherwise sick soil of grandiosity and narcissism.

Narcissism feeds on rigidity. It leaves no room for nuance, for contradiction, for anyone else's experience. That’s how we arrive at the grotesque notion that Transwomen are just men in dresses, or that Transmen are failed dykes… or whatever the hate-speech catch of the day is.

Narcissists have no room for anything other than their own impressions, senses of themselves - they are rigid, and they are terrified, and they certainly make interesting patients.

Let’s touch some grass, and sink into our human roots for a moment:

Banana Slugs: No hierarchy, no gods, no masters

Banana slugs are hermaphroditic. Each slug possesses both male and female reproductive organs. When two slugs mate, both can fertilize and be fertilized, often simultaneously.

Willow Trees: Gender is seasonal

Some willow species can switch between producing male and female flowers from year to year. They're known as labile in sex expression - meaning gendered traits aren’t fixed, even within the same organism. For willow trees gender is not a core identity, but a fluid role.

Ancient Human Cultures: Gender non-conforming gods

The goddess Inanna was worshipped in ancient Mesopotamia with priests who were assigned male at birth but lived as women - early examples of institutionalized gender fluidity within religious systems. Divinity made space for complexity. Gender was mystical, not medical.

How can you argue with nature? Human nature? The nature of the gods? 

You could try to of course. Millions do. An army of narcissists shaking their terrified fists from their porches saying, “There’s only two genders!”, isn’t just pathetic, it’s inaccurate. 

There are not only two genders. 

There is only one reality - and that reality contains multitudes.