About Angela

A practitioner who has heard the hardest stories, and means it when she says little shocks her.

Angela grew up in Homer, Alaska, in a community of about 1,500 people where her family had homesteaded for four generations. She left home at 15 and spent the next several years largely on her own, figuring out how the world worked without much support.
She fell into social work in her early twenties through a friend who mentioned a flexible job. She was good at it from the start. Clinicians kept recognizing something in her and pulling her in closer, teaching her what they knew. Over nearly twenty years she worked alongside people in domestic violence shelters, substance use recovery, child protective services, foster care, and with families supporting children with developmental disabilities. She has heard stories from the hardest places in human experience, and very little of it shocks her.
What she kept hitting a wall. She could understand people's patterns. She could help them understand themselves. But understanding a pattern and changing it are different things, and she knew it every time.
In 2020, driving home from her daughter's birthday party, a podcast episode came on, Carl Buchheit talking about how the brain holds patterns and how to change them at their source rather than just describe them. "My mind was absolutely blown," she says. "All the work I had been doing, it's nothing compared to this." She called the program the next day. Heard the cost. Signed up anyway. Sold most of what she owned. Loaded herself and her two children into a 5-by-8 trailer and drove from Anchorage to Berkeley.
She now works with people in the territory she spent her career in: relationships, intimacy, sexuality, shame, and the patterns that keep people from feeling at home with themselves. "The answer," she says, "is usually connection. Even though it's difficult."