I have never fit neatly into one box, and I don’t expect my clients to either.

I studied Biology and Psychology at Michigan State University years before receiving my Master of Social Work from the University of Michigan.  I remain fascinated by life: minds, bodies, relationships, communities, ecosystems, and the many incredible ways they adapt, get stuck, break down, and recover.

Before becoming a psychotherapist, I spent years working with environmental and socially oriented community organizations. My work included helping protect Michigan’s water, farmland, and open space, as well as co-founding a sustainable community and farm.

Those experiences continue to shape how I understand this strange, mircalous and tragic experience of being a human. We are not isolated minds. We are embodied beings living within relationships, communities, histories, cultures, and environments. 

Healing may happen inside an individual, but it rarely happens in isolation.

Where I've Practiced

I trained clinically at Community Mental Health, providing one-on-one and group therapy to people navigating serious mental illness , often with long histories of hospitalization, medication trials, and treatments that hadn't yet helped. From there I spent nearly five years at Michigan Progressive Health, a ketamine clinic, working with clients whose depression, suicidality, and trauma had resisted almost everything else. I sat with people before, during, and after ketamine treatment, through altered states and hard-won breakthrough. When I opened my own practice, I didn't leave that work behind: I still collaborate with Michigan Progressive Health and other clinics, and I still specialize in the people too often described as "complex", which, in my experience, usually just means human.

Science-y, Philosophical, and Human

I’m curious by nature. I am equally likely to reach for a research study, a biological and evolutionary explanation, a poetic or evocative analogy, an existential question, or a joke that cracks a smile in the midst of tears and tension.

I care about evidence, but I don’t believe people can be reduced to diagnoses, neural circuits and nuerochemicals, or collections of symptoms or circumstances. I care about meaning, community, and connection to something larger than ourselves... but I don’t believe in imposing a worldview or prescribing what should be meaningful to someone else.

What matters is what matters to you.

Bringing a Person Into the Room

I don’t believe a therapist’s humanity is a distraction from the work and play of psychotherapy.

My life should not become the subject of your therapy, and you should never need to take care of me. But I won't pretend that I have no history, values, personality, or emotional responses. Professional doesn't mean being a nuetral, blank-slate as someone bravely bears the deepest truths.

I disclose more than the average therapist when I believe it will serve you, create warmth, or make something happening between us easier to understand. I will try tell you when I don’t know something. I may tell you when I am moved, confused, concerned, impressed, or amused. I'll try to admit when I make mistakes. And I will. 

I take the work seriously. I don’t believe seriousness is solemnity. Silly is serious too, and laughter is at least one of the best medicines. 

What I Care About

I care about compassion that can tolerate honesty, tenderness that won't run or break, science without reductionism, connection and meaning without prescription, and relationships where we can trust eachother enough to disagree.

I care about helping people heal what has been wounded, but also about what becomes possible afterward: agency, connection, meaning, play, purpose, community, and self-actualization.

The short version is that I care about humaning: the lifelong, unfinished practice of becoming more fully alive.