About Me

My path to clinical work has been circuitous. I spent the first portion of my career in academia, working as a researcher, data analyst, and teacher across university settings, and finishing a dissertation on diseases of despair among working-class men. Across all of it, one question kept surfacing: what gives rise to human suffering, and how might it be meaningfully alleviated?

 

My degrees span Political Science, Theology, Social Work, and Social Policy, and that interdisciplinary background isn't incidental to how I practice: it's foundational. I think in systems. I look for the place where history, psychology, culture, and individual experience intersect, because that's usually where the most important things are happening.

 

In the room, I work quickly, not in a way that rushes the process, but in the sense that I tend to see patterns fast—the psychological architecture underneath someone's presenting problem, the way an old story is running a current relationship, the place where someone is stuck and why. Colleagues refer clients to me when they need someone who can cut through complexity and make traction where other approaches have stalled. I ask a lot of questions, offer a lot of analogies, and I will challenge you—always in service of helping you see something you haven't been able to see yet.

 

I have a particular interest in working with men navigating relational and identity challenges—a population I find both underserved and deeply rewarding to work with. Beyond that, much of my work centers on infidelity and relationship rupture, complicated grief, the long reach of early loss, and adults whose history has quietly organized their present in ways they haven't yet understood.

 

I also maintain one foot in academia as a current instructor, and I have a longstanding commitment to working with graduate students, faculty, and first-generation students navigating the particular pressures of academic life, pressures I understand from the inside as a first-generation college graduate myself.

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I grew up in rural Illinois, have lived briefly in ten countries, and currently practice in Evanston. Outside the therapy room, I am an avid cyclist, play both volleyball and softball, and am reliably excellent at contributing enthusiasm—if not always answers—to trivia teams.