Meet Mia
I am driven by a profound sense that individual care and community care are interwoven, and that healing involves mourning and meaning-making, while expanding our capacity for connection, pleasure, & aliveness.
My background
Before I became a therapist, I explored different passions: political activism, cultural anthropology, public health research, and studying herbal medicine as part of my own healing work.
In the past, I actually never really believed in therapy. I was skeptical of approaches that located emotional suffering solely within the individual, without considering the world in which we live—a world shaped by inequality, isolation, community trauma, and chronic stress.
When I look back on my path now, I laugh at the recognition that despite my cynicism about therapy - I kind of always was a therapist.
I was that friend, family member, and colleague that people came to for support. Connecting with others on an emotional level, and wading into the difficult parts of life has always been what makes me feel alive and present.
I began to find my professional home when I started volunteering as a community grief support facilitator at an organization serving children and families. This work fed my soul, and I wanted to learn more. So I returned to school to study social work—a natural fit for me because it places our emotional lives within the larger context of our relationships, communities, cultures, and the world around us.
At the foundation of my therapeutic approach is the person-in-environment ethos of social work and the art of ethnography. I pay close attention to the social and cultural ecosystems of a person’s life, the stories and experiences that shape how they understand themselves, and the ways these experiences are held and expressed in the body and nervous system.
About me
I grew up in Berkeley, California, and I live there now—with my son, our dog, and cat.
I spend a lot of my time reading about healing—stories of struggle and redemption, biographies and memoirs, theories of epigenetics and the neuroscience of emotions, self-help books, and sociopolitical analyses of depression, anxiety, and attention problems in our society.
I am also interested in perspectives on healing outside of conventional Western psychology—including plant medicine, Buddhist psychological perspectives, earth-based and ancestral traditions, and even astrology (Virgo Sun, Cancer Moon, Scorpio Rising—with a 12th-house stellium in Libra, naturally!)
I also love to draw, take pictures of plants and sleeping cats, play the guitar, and play catch with my dog, Selby.
Education & Training
Education
MSW — Social Work
University of California, Berkeley
MA — Cultural Anthropology & Social Transformation
Concentration: Gender, Ecology, & Society California Institute of Integral Studies
BA — Women’s Studies
University of California, Santa Cruz
Specialized Training
EMDR Trained
Somatic Experiencing® — Advanced Level, in progress.
Clinical Training
Fellowship — Department of Psychiatry, Kaiser Richmond.
Internship — The Psychotherapy Institute, Berkeley
Final Curve
When you turn the corner
And you run into yourself
Then you know that you have turned
All the corners that are left.
– Langston Hughes