People and Issues I Work With
Men & Emotional Availability
Most of the men I work with are not falling apart. They're functioning—often well, but something is costing them: a marriage that's eroding, a pattern of conflict they can't stop, a sense that they've become someone they didn't intend to be, a desire for something more from life, an insecurity that can't be quieted. Many men were raised to be disconnected from their interiority--to put on a strong front while all that swirls beneath remains hidden. This exterior strength can feel quite fragile.
What I've found is that men often don't need more advice or better techniques. They need to understand why they react the way they do, where it came from, and what it would take to do something different. That's the work I do.
Women &
Inflection Points
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from doing everything right and still feeling like it isn't enough. Many of the women I work with tend to fall into patterns of over-functioning. They set the bar high for themselves and for the people around them, and they pursue these standards with intensity and at times rigidity. And, it's often what has gotten them this far. What's harder to see from the inside is that the intensity itself is often the problem. Anxiety masquerades as competence.
This is the work I find myself drawn to: helping women understand what their over-functioning is protecting, where their standards came from, and how they can relax into greater kindness and compassion towards themselves and others.
I have a particular passion working with women navigating infidelity, whether they strayed or were betrayed, those struggling with the near-constant bodily changes that come with aging, those who've encountered significant loss, and those who experience over-protection or enmeshment with their children.
Students & Academics
Academic life has its own pressures and its own particular silences around them. There is the performance of certainty when you feel anything but, and the way comparison operates as a constant low hum. There's the pressure to specialize, to produce, to stay current--and the sense that everyone else has figured something out. There's the impossible pull between getting something done and making something good. There's depletion, the accumulating weight of teaching, research, and service: an increase in investment paired with a decrease in stability, time, and pay.
I have spent much of my own career inside academic institutions, and I bring that understanding into the room. I work with graduate students, faculty, and staff navigating the psychological terrain of academic life: the pressure, the transitions, the imposter experience, and the deeper questions about meaning and direction that academic work can both surface and suppress. First-generation students and those navigating the particular disorientation of social class mobility are especially welcome here.
Couples & Discernment
Most couples don't arrive in crisis overnight. The distance builds slowly, through conflict that never fully resolves, intimacy that quietly recedes, or a rupture that has left one or both partners unsure whether repair is possible.
I work with couples navigating infidelity, disconnection, and the difficult question of whether to stay or go. For couples at a genuine crossroads, I help people get clear about what they actually want. I also enjoy working with couples at the beginning of their relationship who are wanting to build a strong foundation going forward as well as those who find themselves in the “third phase” of marriage as empty nesters needing to re-find themselves and each other.
Religious Identity & High-Control Environments
Some of the most formative—and least examined—psychological shaping happens inside religious communities and high-control environments. The rules about who you are allowed to be, what you are allowed to want, which emotions are acceptable and which are dangerous. For many adults, those early frameworks continue to operate long after they've left—in their relationships, their sexuality, their sense of worth, and their capacity for genuine self-expression.
I work with adults who grew up inside repressive or high-control environments and are working to understand what those experiences built inside them and what it would take to live differently. This often includes untangling complicated relationships to sexuality, authority, shame, and the self.
