About Me

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 neutral, blank-slate as a client bravely bears their deepest truths.

I disclose more about myself than the average therapist when I believe it will serve you, create warmth, or make something happening in our relationship or interactions easier to understand. I will try to 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'm sure I will. 

I take the work seriously but I don’t believe seriousness is solemnity. Laughter may not be the best medicine, but it is at least one of the best. Silly is serious too.

About Me, Personally

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.  

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. Then I went back to school to become a psychotherapist. 

Throughout it all I have always remained fascinated by life: minds, bodies, relationships, communities, ecosystems, and the many incredible ways they adapt, get stuck, break down, and recover.

Those experiences continue to shape how I understand this strange, miraculous 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 in community mental health, providing individual and group therapy to people living with serious mental illness, many of whom were also navigating poverty. They often came with long histories of medication trials, psychotherapy, and other treatments that had not yet helped enough.

From there, I spent nearly five years at Michigan Progressive Health, a ketamine clinic, working with clients whose depression, suicidality, trauma, and chronic pain had resisted almost everything else. Many of the people I served there had access to considerably greater material resources and more treatment options. Those resources mattered, but they did not make the suffering any less intense.

I had the unique experience of sitting with people before, during, and after ketamine treatment, through altered states where joy could come as easily as a temporary break-down of reality... and either could lead to  breakthroughs.

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 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 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, neurochemical "imbalances", 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.

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 each-other 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.