Why I Became a Therapist

I have always been interested in the parts of people that do not announce themselves clearly.

Before I became a therapist, I studied English and literature because I was drawn to subtext, contradiction, metaphor, memory, and the ways people sometimes say more than they intended. That still shapes how I listen now. I pay attention to shifts in language, recurring images, humor, silence, and the moments when a story seems to carry more than one meaning.

I do not assume that noticing something means I understand it completely. I hold my impressions lightly and bring them forward as questions, not verdicts. You are the authority on your own experience. My role is to help us look together at what may be difficult to see from the inside.

Before entering private practice, I spent seven years in social services working with high-acuity trauma, family systems, and institutions that often misunderstood the people they were supposed to help. I learned quickly that survival does not always look tidy, likable, productive, or emotionally regulated. Sometimes it looks angry. Sometimes it looks shut down. Sometimes it looks exceptionally competent. Sometimes it looks like someone who can explain every pattern in perfect language and still has no idea how to stop living inside it.

My work now sits at the intersection of trauma, attachment, neurodivergence, chronic illness, grief, and relational healing. I am especially interested in people who have become very good at surviving alone but still do not know how to feel safe, wanted, or fully themselves in relationship.

As a late-identified AuDHD therapist, I understand the experience of spending years trying to solve yourself with explanations that never quite fit. I know the cost of masking, overcompensating, appearing capable, and quietly falling apart later. I do not approach neurodivergence as a collection of deficits to manage. I approach it as a way of being that deserves curiosity, accommodation, honesty, and room to exist without constant self-correction.

I also work closely with chronically ill clients and people navigating medical trauma. I understand how quickly a person’s reality can be minimized once their body becomes complicated. I do not confuse emotional distress with proof that physical symptoms are not real, and I do not expect people to perform gratitude, resilience, or acceptance while they are grieving a body, future, or life they did not choose.

Clinically, I am relational, direct, observant, and deeply interested in meaning. I hold a conceptual map, but I am not attached to being right. I will tell you what I notice, ask before I go somewhere difficult, and take your disagreement seriously. If my understanding does not fit, we revise it together.

I also believe therapy can be serious without being solemn every minute. My colleagues have told me they have never heard so much laughter coming from therapy sessions. I joke that it is because I have the funniest clients, which may also have something to do with having one of the highest-trauma caseloads. Humor can be relief, connection, defiance, protection, truth-telling, or all of those at once. Sometimes the most honest thing a person says all week arrives as a joke, and that is often very good therapy material.

I became a therapist because I wanted to create a place where people did not have to flatten themselves into symptoms, diagnoses, or palatable stories. I wanted to work with the whole person, including the parts that are intelligent, contradictory, difficult, funny, grieving, defended, tender, furious, and still trying.