I have never been good at staying.

Or maybe the truth is gentler than that: the staying was never mine to choose. I was born in Hong Kong and gone by six. Paris, then Belfast at twelve, the year my father left the world and took a certain kind of home with him. Back to Hong Kong at sixteen, alone. Then Canada, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles, where I moved five more times before I found a house that finally held still.

I’m the eldest daughter of an immigrant family. If you are too, you already know the weight of it: the translating, the holding, the being strong before you knew there was another option.

I lost my father early, to distance and to the particular grief of loving someone who couldn’t stay. My mother I’ve spent a lifetime learning: the ache of a love that didn’t always know how to reach me, and the slow work of understanding her anyway.

For a long time I thought healing meant arriving somewhere, a version of myself that was finally finished. I know now it’s closer to a river I keep returning to, and a body that finally asked me to listen.

That’s why I created TheMudRm. A mudroom is the place you take off your shoes, set down what you’ve been carrying, and come in as you are. It’s the room I wish I’d had, and I want to build it for the next kid, the next family, the next person who needs it.

How I work

I’m a Marriage and Family Therapist Trainee, and my approach is relational and somatic: we are shaped in relationship, and our bodies hold that story. For almost five years I’ve worked alongside children and families, including many neurodivergent kids, using Floortime, where connection comes before everything else.

I am trained in the Internal Family Systems (IFS), which sees us as made up of many parts that all deserve understanding, and the Comprehensive Resource Model (CRM), a somatic approach to building safety and steadiness. I bring a trauma-informed lens to all of it, so you set the pace and nothing is rushed. I also taught yoga for eight years and facilitate sound baths. I’m bilingual in English and Chinese.

I see clients at Life Source Affordable Counseling & Training Institute, under the supervision of Amanda Barnes, License No. LMFT139812

Who I’m here for

Children, teens, and the parents and caregivers who love them.

Play, connection, and a place to feel less alone in it.

Anyone carrying a loss.

A person, a home, a role, or the life you expected.

Adults making sense of the family they grew up in,

and how it still lives in their bodies.

Underneath it all, I’m someone who has spent her life learning how to belong, to people, to places, and to herself. I want the next person who feels unhomed to feel, for a moment, less alone.

If that’s you, come as you are :)