Therapy in Fairfax, VA
If you live or work in Fairfax and you're thinking about starting therapy, you're probably not new to self-reflection. Many people who find their way to my practice have already done the reading and have a pretty good sense of what's going on with them. What they're looking for isn't someone to explain anxiety or trauma to them — it's someone who can actually help them change.
That's the kind of work I do.
I'm a Licensed Professional Counselor based in McLean, Virginia. I see clients in person and via telehealth throughout Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. — which means Fairfax residents have both options, depending on what works best for your schedule and how you prefer to work.
What I Treat
My practice focuses on the issues that tend to sit underneath the surface: the patterns that don't respond to insight alone, the anxiety that persists even when you know what's driving it, the relational dynamics that keep reappearing no matter how much you understand them.
I work with adults navigating depression, trauma, OCD, and anxiety — including anxiety that doesn't announce itself as anxiety. It can look like overwork, difficulty delegating, trouble tolerating ambiguity, or a persistent low-grade vigilance that never quite turns off. If that's familiar, anxiety therapy addresses the underlying pattern rather than the surface symptoms.
I also work with couples — not to teach communication scripts, but to get underneath the surface of what's actually happening between two people and why.
How I Work
My approach draws from several evidence-based modalities: EMDR, Internal Family Systems (IFS), and Experiential Dynamic Therapy (AEDP and ISTDP). These aren't techniques I apply interchangeably — they reflect a coherent underlying philosophy. The premise is that most of what brings people to therapy is rooted in early experience, held in the body and in automatic patterns of relating, and that lasting change requires working at that level rather than staying in the realm of explanation and analysis.
For people dealing with trauma, EMDR offers a way to complete what the nervous system couldn't finish at the time; not by re-living the experience, but by allowing something that's been stuck to finally move. For people who feel internally fragmented — who notice parts of themselves that want different things, or who feel hijacked by certain emotional states — IFS provides a framework for working with that complexity directly. And for people whose defenses have become a barrier to their own emotional life, the experiential work of AEDP and ISTDP creates the conditions for something to actually move.
Who I Work With
Most of my clients are adults who are functioning well by most external measures and struggling underneath them. They're often high-achieving, psychologically curious people — professionals, parents, people at transitional points in their lives — who have the self-awareness to know something needs to change and the motivation to do real work in order to change it.
Fairfax County has one of the highest concentrations of defense and intelligence contractors in the country. That professional context shapes how people approach therapy in specific ways — privacy matters, help-seeking can feel like a liability, and the habits of mind that make someone effective in that work don't always make it easier to sit with uncertainty or emotional complexity. If any of that resonates, it's familiar territory here.
Getting Started
I offer a free initial consultation to give us both the chance to determine whether we're a good fit before committing to working together.
If you're ready to start, or if you have questions about whether this kind of therapy is right for what you're dealing with, reach out to schedule a consultation.