Dr. Elise is passionate about emotional and relational wellbeing. When there’s harmony and balance in our inner world and our relationships, the stuff of life can seem easier to tackle. Using an empathic, collaborative, and holistic style, Dr. Elise helps clients build long-term strategies for happiness and fulfilment.
Dr. Elise began her training as a Marriage and Family Therapist in 2011. Across the greater Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas, she gained extensive experience in community and hospital clinics treating individuals, couples, and families impacted by a broad range of psychological difficulties. Since moving to Australia in 2015, Dr. Elise has continued to support the mental well-being of folks in the Melbourne community through her Ph.D. training, research fellowships, and clinical work in private practice.
In her work with couples, Dr. Elise believes that a secure bond is what makes for healthy and resilient relationships. She helps couples strengthen this bond through developing skills to clearly communicate needs, emotionally attune (resonate with your partner’s feelings), and trust being vulnerable with each other. She guides couples in healing communication-style mismatches, periods of emotional disconnection, infidelity and mistrust, child rearing conflicts, separation and divorce, and step-family issues.
In addition, Dr. Elise specialises in treating individuals coping with mood and/or sleep disorders (including new parents). She helps clients develop sustainable strategies to better cope with and recover from constant worrying and anxious thoughts, feeling down, depressed, and hopeless, and periods of insomnia and hypersomnia.
Dr. Elise remains active in research conducting clinical trials for psychological interventions to improve mental health. She has published several scientific articles in leading psychology journals, presented research findings at national and international conferences, and has held fellowship positions at the Florey Institute and Monash University.
She supports same- and opposite-sex couples, persons of all genders, cultures, backgrounds, faiths, and all relationship styles (including monogamous and poly relationships). Dr. Elise also regularly provides therapy for members of the LGBTQIA+ community for issues such as identity discovery, gender dysphoria, pre and post-op gender confirmation issues, stigma, and bullying and discrimination.
Dr. Elise also offers counselling in Spanish (ofrece terapia en español).