How I Work

The short version

Sessions with me are direct, relational, and experiential. We talk about your life — and we also find ways to bring what's happening out there into the room, so we can work with it while it's actually alive. Over time, most people find that the work gets more honest, more embodied, and surprisingly more playful.

We go toward things

A lot of therapy is organized, consciously or not, around managing difficult material at a safe distance. We'll talk about the hard thing, but carefully, with plenty of room to back away from it.

I work differently. If something difficult is present — a pattern, a memory, a feeling that keeps surfacing — we move toward it rather than around it. That includes trauma. It includes the things that are hardest to say out loud. It includes whatever is happening between us in the room right now that might be easier to leave unspoken.

This isn't about being confrontational. It's about the fact that the things we consistently avoid are usually exactly where the work needs to go. I'll name what I notice. I'll ask about the thing you just skipped over. I'll stay steady when the material gets heavy, because that steadiness is part of what makes it possible to go there at all.

We work with what's alive right now

Most of what shapes us — our patterns, our defenses, our ways of relating — didn't develop through insight. It developed through experience, repeated over time, until it became automatic. Changing it works the same way: through experience, in real time, with someone present.

This is why I pay close attention to what's happening between us in the session itself. The dynamic you struggle with at work, in relationships, with yourself — it will show up here too. When it does, that's not a problem to manage. That's the work becoming available in its most direct form.

I'll notice when something shifts in the room. I'll name the pattern when I see it playing out between us. I'll slow things down when the body is saying something the words aren't. The goal is to make the session itself the place where something actually changes, not just the place where you report on changes you're hoping to make elsewhere.

We Laugh

This is the part that surprises people most.

Therapy is, like life, tragicomic. The things that hurt us are often also, from a certain angle, absurd. The patterns we're most ashamed of are frequently the funniest ones to look at directly. I don't shy from the darkness — and I've found that humor is one of the most reliable ways to acclimate to it. Laughing at something doesn't mean you're not taking it seriously. Often it means you've gotten close enough to it that you can finally breathe around it.

Clients sometimes tell me that they’re a little bewildered that they're having fun in therapy. But that quality — the aliveness, the irreverence, the sense that even the hard stuff can be met with curiosity and even delight — is part of what makes the work stick.

The goal was never just to suffer less. It's to have more range, more presence, more capacity to stay inside difficult experience without shutting down. Laughter is part of how we get there.

What this looks like over time

Experiential work moves faster than most people expect. Because we're working with what's actually alive in the room rather than reconstructing it from memory, things shift in real time — often within a single session. Most weeks you'll leave with something concrete: a new way of seeing a pattern, a task to try in a relationship that matters, a moment of choice where there used to be only reflex.

The arc still has shape. Early on, people are learning what this kind of work actually feels like — that honesty is met with curiosity, that difficult material can be approached rather than managed, that the relationship between us is itself part of what we're working with. That foundation matters.

But change doesn't wait for the foundation to be complete. It tends to start happening immediately, in the relationships people care most about, because that's exactly where we're aiming from the beginning.