What Therapy Is (and Isn't) With Me

I'm a deeply relational, psychoanalytic, existential, meaning-making therapist. That's a mouthful, so let me actually explain what it means in practice.

I hold a conceptual map. From very early on, I'm building a real, evolving picture of what's driving what you're carrying, and I share that picture with you as we go. I come to sessions holding that map, tracking patterns, noticing what's hard to see from the inside, and helping us both understand where the work is asking to go next.

I'm direct, but I ask first. I don't sit back passively, and I also don't push without your consent. If I think something is worth naming plainly, I'll usually ask before I go there. You stay a participant in your own process, not a passenger in mine.

What I'm not is a curriculum. I won't hand you a clean, linear, step-by-step protocol, because that's not honestly how deep change works. Here's the part almost nobody tells you up front: articulation isn't transformation. Most people who've spent real years in therapy already understand themselves remarkably well. They can explain their patterns fluently. And they're still stuck. That's not a failure of insight; it's the actual, mind-bending nature of this work: understanding something and being transformed by it are two different processes, and the second one usually isn't tidy. What integrates old wounds is often something less linear: grief, rupture and repair, the slow experience of being met by another person consistently over time.

A metaphor, because I'm a writer and I lean on them: I think of this work like cartography. When surveyors first map new land, they can estimate a remarkable amount just by looking. But to make the map actually match the ground, they have to do something called ground truthing, walking the terrain, testing it against reality, correcting the map as they go. That's what therapy with me is like. I'm not walking ahead of you down a route I've already decided on. I'm walking beside you, helping us continually test the map against the ground until it actually reflects your lived reality.

One more thing worth naming, since I think it matters: the most valuable moments in therapy often happen when your material shows up between us, when I miss you, frustrate you, or remind you of someone who's hurt you before. That's not the therapy failing. That's usually the therapy working. Repair, when it's done honestly, is some of the most powerful work we can do, and it works best when we can talk about it together rather than quietly concluding the relationship isn't the right fit. I'd rather you tell me. I promise to meet that honestly.

And on the whole person: mind and body aren't separate in how I work, and I have particular focus in chronic illness and its relationship to trauma.

Whether you're navigating trauma, neurodivergence, chronic illness, grief, or relationships, I don't see isolated symptoms. I see an interconnected person whose story deserves to make sense. My job isn't to hand you a better script. It's to help you understand the one you've been living, revise the map where it no longer matches the ground, and discover that healing is possible without pretending the past never happened.