Hi, it’s me, Danni!

I have always had the Gemini quality of being able to hold multiple perspectives. Growing up, I tried hard to understand all the perspectives in my intense, Italian-American family.

I grew up in San Francisco (if you’re from SF too, feel free to ask me what high school I went to – #ifyouknowyouknow). I come from a working class, garbage man family that was both chaotic and close. Big feelings came naturally to me. I became a therapist to learn how to work with my feelings, instead of being controlled by them.

Thanks to my love of big feelings, I trained in psychodynamic therapy. I worked with teenagers in public high schools in San Francisco. I loved working with teens, but when they left my office they went back into their families, which was often a source of conflict: I needed to work with the family, too. I tried for years to find family therapy training but little existed in the Bay Area. Eventually, I moved to New York and dove deep into family therapy training at the Ackerman Institute.

Besides doing therapy, I’m a longtime professor, teaching graduate students in Counseling Psychology at various universities. I love introducing students to the developmental trauma perspective as the core of my Human Development and Psychopathology classes. In my Couples, Families, and Systems class, I invented a card game to teach the theoretical foundations of family therapy, because my two favorite things are learning and play.

Danni role modeled incredible transparency and honesty… it was a beautiful shared experience that highlighted Danni’s identity as a learner alongside us. Danni was a role model for how I desire to show up as a therapist.

— Student from my Psychotherapies with Couples, Families, and Systems Class, 2022