How I work
Understanding before fixing.
Problems often become more workable when we slow down enough to understand the pattern, the context, and what the experience may be trying to communicate.
Four principles that shape the work
Start with curiosity.
Instead of beginning with “How do we make this stop?” I often begin with “What is happening here?” Curiosity can create room for information that criticism, urgency, or shame makes difficult to see.
Look for what is already working.
People develop ways of coping for reasons. Even a pattern that has become painful may contain intelligence, protection, or a need that has not yet been understood. Finding those pieces can make change more practical and less adversarial.
Relationships matter.
None of us develops in isolation. Family patterns, partnerships, school, work, culture, and earlier experiences all shape how we respond to one another. In couples and families, I am interested in the pattern between people, not in choosing a person to blame.
Make insight usable.
Understanding is important, but it should eventually help everyday life. The work may involve noticing a pattern earlier, communicating differently, building structure around ADHD, approaching a conflict with more flexibility, or trying something concrete between sessions.
Influences
The ideas that inform my work.
Process-Oriented Psychology, founded by Arnold Mindell, PhD, has shaped how I listen. Mindell, a physicist, therapist, and author, brought together Jungian psychology, physics, Taoism, and shamanism in what he called dreambody work. His approach works with dreams and with the body, and it treats the situations of our lives as a dreaming process that is asking for our attention. It suggests that the experiences we most want to push away often carry information worth understanding. In practice, that means I am slower to label something a problem and quicker to ask what it might be pointing toward.
Seventeen years of training with Matt Modrcin, PhD taught me to watch what happens between people rather than only inside them. Alongside that, my background in child development keeps me attentive to where someone is in their own growth, and to how differently the same event can land at six, sixteen, and sixty.
Mindfulness, neuroscience, attachment-oriented perspectives, ADHD life coaching, and my current training in Brainspotting, a trauma-informed approach that grew out of EMDR, fill in the rest. None of it arrives in a session as terminology. It shows up as the quality of attention I bring and the questions I think to ask.
You do not have to arrive with an explanation. We can begin with whatever feels most present.
What sessions feel like
What we actually do together.
When we meet, we’ll start with what is happening now: what feels difficult, what you want to understand, and what you hope could be different.
You do not need to prepare a perfect explanation. We can begin with the thing that feels most present.
From there, the shape of the work depends on who is in the room. With an individual it may mean tracing a pattern back to where it started, or making room for anxiety, low mood, or the after-effects of something painful. With a couple it usually means slowing an exchange down enough to hear what each person is protecting. With a young person it often happens through play, drawing, or a conversation that looks like it is about something else entirely.
My work with children often involves therapeutic teaching stories that address anxiety, sadness, friendship struggles, and how to manage conflict and anger.