I'm a psychotherapist. Someone recently asked me what I love about my work. I sat with the question for a moment.
I love working with people and getting to know them. We build trust. If they want, I'll gently nudge them toward some truths and new perspectives that can build confidence, lessen fear, and make life more fulfilling. For some, I'm the ally they never felt they had.
I was a little slow in learning and accepting some of the truths that I've come to accept. I'm grateful to be able to help someone along their best path sooner than I found mine.
In its purest form, I'm just one person sitting with another person, not some exalted expert on living life. I bring education and experience to the table, but what are we really doing but trying to make this existence a little easier?
We're storytellers, all of us. Every one of us creates stories about our lives, filtered through the lens of experience. In part because we have a hard time tolerating the unknown, and when the full picture isn't available, we fill in the blanks.
Some of these stories serve us well. Others don't.
At the core of my practice is helping you recognize the stories you tell yourself, understand why some of those narratives may be working against you, and through a collaborative process, begin to change your perceptions of yourself and others.
We all carry our past into the present. Remember Venn diagrams? Imagine two circles one representing "then" and one representing "now." For many of us, those circles are almost completely overlapped, and we react to present experiences through old filters without even knowing it.
The work is in gently pulling those circles apart. Not to erase the past, but to understand its influence so it doesn't silently run the show or cause outsized responses to what's going on in the present.
When you can recognize that a reaction belongs more to "then" than to "now," you gain real agency over how you move through your life.
I sometimes use the image of someone standing by a long line of overstuffed shopping carts. (Alright, I might use too many metaphors...) Each cart is overloaded with memories, experiences, love, loss, suffering, wisdom, traumas, resentment, regret, unmet needs and expectations, shame, etc.
These accumulate, weigh us down, and keep us stuck. The process of healing and growth involves taking an honest inventory: What's in these carts? What still serves you, and what's long past its usefulness? What belongs to someone else entirely?
It isn't always comfortable work, but a lightness starts to creep in. Cart by cart, the load gets lighter, and the path ahead opens.
Your nervous system isn't broken. It's doing what millions of years of evolution shaped it to do: keep you alive. We carry a built-in surveillance system, constantly scanning for threat, often outside awareness.
This part of the brain is ancient. An old operating system with little nuance, more like a toggle: safe or danger. When it senses danger, it mobilizes fight or flight; when threat feels inescapable, it shuts you down.
The difficulty is that it can't always distinguish real danger from an echo of an old wound. A raised voice, a dismissive look, an unexpected change — your body may react as if survival is at stake because, at some earlier time, it felt that way.
Understanding this is the beginning of self-compassion and the ground for building more flexible responses.
Anxiety, depression, avoidance, emotional numbness, substance use—we often treat these types of issues simply as problems to eliminate. Some people do have true chemical imbalances, and medication can be essential. But many of these states have been medicalized, framed as illnesses rather than meaningful adaptations.
Bruce Ecker's work with memory reconsolidation suggests many patterns began as the brain's best response to an unbearable situation. A child who shut down in a volatile home wasn't broken, but protecting themselves with the only tools available.
The issue isn't that these responses exist. Maybe they've outlived their usefulness and run automatically. When we see symptoms not as proof something is wrong with us, but as evidence of how we adapted to survive, shame softens and change becomes possible by understanding and updating our protections.
Living creatures are wired to move away from discomfort: roots grow toward water and away from dry soil, vines turn toward light, a cat leaves a place that's too hot, birds scatter at sudden movement. We're no different.
But so much of what matters in life asks us to stay present with discomfort rather than run from it. Often what really makes us happier requires pushing through discomfort. I offer individualized tools and strategies that move you toward healthier responses to whatever life presents, drawing on approaches like Phil Stutz's work, polyvagal-informed practices, mindfulness, and other frameworks.
The goal isn't to stop feeling. It's to understand how you feel and how you respond. A favorite quote from Viktor Frankl:
"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."
We're shaped by forces far larger than our individual experiences: family systems, cultural expectations, historical legacies, socioeconomic realities, gender, race, sexuality, and the communities we grew up in or were excluded from.
These forces get inside us and influence what we believe we deserve, what we think is possible, and who we're allowed to be.
Therapy that only looks inward misses half the picture. Much of the weight we carry was inherited, imposed, or absorbed from systems that were often not designed with our wellbeing in mind.
When we can see which beliefs are truly ours and which were handed to us, we gain a real choice about what to keep and what to set down.
If the possibility of working together interests you — for yourself, your teen, as a couple, or as a family — please reach out to schedule a free consultation. There's much more I can share than what appears on this site.
We'll set up a Zoom where I can explain how I work, discuss fees, tell you why this website isn't beige, and any other questions you'll have. Then you can decide whether you'd like to begin the work with me.