Borderline Personality Disorder
Virtual individual therapy and DBT skills sessions for adults throughout California.
"You are worthy of love. Not because you've earned it, fixed yourself, or become someone different, but because love is what you are at your core. My work is to help you find your way back to that essential truth."
-Dr. Nicole Strauss
You know what it’s like to want to crawl out of your own skin
The pain that comes out of nowhere and feels too big, too fast, or too overwhelming to hold. The relationships that swing between feeling like everything and nothing, sometimes within the same afternoon. The desperate need to matter to someone, to be seen, held, and chosen, colliding over and over with the terror that if anyone truly saw you, they would leave.
You're not dramatic. You're not manipulative. You're not a difficult person who makes everything harder than it needs to be. You are a person in profound pain, pain that makes complete sense given where you came from and what you learned about yourself and the world before you were even old enough to question it.
Most people with BPD (or strongly related patterns) grew up without consistent, attuned love. Not necessarily without parents who tried, but without the specific kind of attunement that a highly emotionally sensitive child needs to learn that their feelings are manageable, safe, and fundamentally okay. Instead, the lesson that landed (however it arrived) was something closer to: you are too much. Your needs are a problem. Love is unpredictable and you have to fight for it, perform for it, or shrink yourself to keep it.
That wound doesn't stay in childhood. It travels with you into every relationship, every moment of conflict, every instance of someone pulling away, seeming disappointed, or not responding the way you needed them to. It shows up as the intensity that frightens people. As the self-destruction that follows these unbearable moments. As the voice that tells you, in your darkest hours, that you don't matter or that it would be easier if you simply weren't here.
I want to say something directly to that part of you: I hear it. I am not afraid of it. And I do not believe it is the truth of who you are.
What I DO believe about you:
Underneath the diagnosis, the patterns, and every behavior that has ever frightened you or cost you something you loved, there is a person who is essentially, fundamentally worthy of love. Not conditionally. Not once you've healed enough or stopped being so reactive or figured out how to need less. Right now, exactly as you are.
I believe this not as a therapeutic technique but as a conviction. Every person who walks into my office carries this worthiness within them, however buried it is under years of pain, survival, and stories that were handed to them before they could ever choose differently. My job is not to fix you. It is to help you find your way back to what was always true.
Shrinking has been your protection strategy. Expansion is your destiny.
Who this type of therapy is for:
My approach with BPD (and related presentations) integrative and depth-oriented. At the foundation is psychodynamic therapy. We go beneath the surface-level behaviors to understand the relational wounds and early patterns that are driving them. Woven into that foundation are DBT-informed skills, compassion-focused therapy, somatic approaches, mindfulness, and spirituality-based work as applicable to you.
This is not a protocol, but a real therapeutic relationship. One in which you will experience, possibly for the first time, what it feels like to be genuinely seen, understood, and valued by another person without having to perform, suppress, or manage yourself to earn it. That corrective experience is not incidental to the treatment. It IS the treatment. And from that foundation, we build something more lasting: your relationship with yourself.
The goal of our work is not for you to need me. It is for you to discover that the love and steadiness you have been searching for in every relationship, crisis, and desperate moment already lives inside of you (and always has). We are going to find it together, and then I am going to help you give that love and steadiness to yourself.
A note on who I am and why this work is personal
I have been doing this work for a long time and I have sat with people carrying some of the heaviest things a person can carry. I trained in inpatient, residential, and outpatient settings working intensively with individuals with severe BPD. I have been in the room with people in genuine crisis, who were dangerous to themselves, and whose presentations would make many clinicians quietly refer out. I am not frightened or alarmed by the extremity of this experience, because I understand it, not just clinically, but personally.
I grew up as a highly sensitive person in a home that wasn't quite built for someone like me. I know what it is like to feel a mismatch in the place that was supposed to be safest. To learn to suppress what I felt, to anticipate the needs of others for my own internal sense of safety, to go looking for love and validation in relationships that ultimately couldn't provide it, and and to keep going back anyway because I didn't yet know there was another way. To not know my own needs as an adult because I had spent so long managing everyone else's. To have learned, slowly and sometimes painfully, to give myself what I have always deeply desired for someone else to give me.
I have never had BPD. But I have lived close enough to the emotional truth underneath it to understand it from the inside. And I have walked a more than decade-long path to the other side. To genuine and unrelenting self-love, to boundaries that actually hold, to real connection, and to a life that feels like mine.
I tell you this because I think you deserve to know who is sitting across from you. I am not observing your experience from a clinical distance. I understand it. I will not flinch from it. I will not be scared away by the intensity of what you carry. And I will never, not for one session, lose sight of the person you are underneath all of it: the person who is worthy of love, who has always been worthy of love, and who is going to find their way back to that truth.
My clients with BPD consistently tell me they feel understood, held, and safe in a way they haven't experienced before. That they can finally exhale. That they feel seen, not as a person with a diagnosis, not as a difficult case, but as a person. That is what I am here to offer you.
About adjunct DBT skills sessions
For some clients, individual therapy alone is the right fit. For others, particularly those with more complex or intense presentations, I also offer adjunct individual DBT skills sessions as a separate, concurrent service.
These sessions focus specifically on building the practical DBT skills toolkit: mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness. They run separately from your therapy session, on a different day of the week, at the same fee of $275 per session.
For clients whose presentations involve more significant risk or instability, I may require concurrent DBT skills work, either individually with me, in a group DBT program with another provider, or both, as well as collaboration with a psychiatrist or participation in an additional support community. This isn't a barrier to working together. It's how I make sure you get the level of support your nervous system actually needs, and how I ensure our therapy work has the stable foundation it requires to go deep.
If you are currently in active crisis or acutely suicidal, individual outpatient therapy is not the right level of care right now, and I will be honest with you about that from our very first conversation. Please reach out to a crisis line or emergency services if you need immediate support.
Who this work is for
Adults who:
✦ Have a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder or recognize BPD-related patterns in themselves
✦ Experience intense, rapidly shifting emotions that feel impossible to control or predict
✦ Struggle with relationships that swing between idealization and devaluation
✦ Engage in impulsive, self-destructive, or self-harming behaviors in moments of overwhelming distress
✦ Carry a deep, persistent belief that they are fundamentally unlovable or broken
✦ Have felt misunderstood, pathologized, or given up on by previous treatment providers
Are ready, even if scared, to do real work toward a different kind of life
What becomes possible?
You will not always feel this way. That is not a platitude. It is a clinical reality and also a personal one.
The intensity doesn't disappear. You are a deep feeler and that is not something to eradicate, but something to work with. But the suffering that currently lives inside that intensity? The self-destruction, the relationship chaos, the voice that tells you that you are unworthy, unlovable, and too much? That can change. Profoundly and permanently.
Clients who do this work find that their emotions become more possible to navigate through. Not smaller, but less consuming. That relationships begin to feel steadier. That the self-criticism softens into something approaching genuine compassion. That they begin, slowly and then more fully, to know who they actually are underneath all the patterns and the pain.
And underneath it all, they find what was always there: a person who is worthy of love. Who is capable of love. Who is, at their core, essentially made of it.
That is what we are working toward. And I would be honored to walk that road with you.
