About Me

I have worked for more than 25 years as a therapist. I have come to believe that much of our emotional pain grows from the distance between who we truly are and who we learned we had to be. Families, relationships, religion, culture, and the communities around us all help shape our identities. Some of those influences give us strength and belonging. Others leave us carrying expectations, shame, fear, or beliefs about ourselves that were never truly ours. Over time, it can become difficult to tell where those messages end and our authentic selves begin. My work is about helping people rediscover that distinction. I bring decades of clinical experience to this work, but I also bring the perspective that comes from having lived, changed, lost, questioned, and begun again. My own experiences with trauma, estrangement, identity, and personal reinvention have taught me that healing is not about returning to the person we were before life affected us. It is about understanding what shaped us, deciding what we still want to carry, and becoming more intentional about who we are now. As a gay man, a veteran, an adoptive father, and someone who has traveled his own complicated path toward authenticity, I understand that personal growth does not happen in a vacuum. Our families, cultures, identities, and sociopolitical environments profoundly affect how safe we feel being seen and how much permission we believe we have to be ourselves. I welcome people from all backgrounds while offering particular sensitivity to those whose identities or life experiences have placed them outside the expectations of their families or communities. Our work together may draw from cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness, ecotherapy, reflection, and other evidence-informed approaches. But these methods are not the goal. They are tools we can use to better understand your patterns, heal what continues to hurt, and make choices that feel more genuinely your own. Self-discovery does not have a finish line. As long as we are alive, we are learning, changing, and becoming. Therapy can provide a place to slow down, listen more carefully to yourself, and ask questions that may have been buried beneath years of simply surviving or meeting everyone else’s expectations. You do not need to become someone entirely new. You may simply need the time, support, and courage to become more fully yourself.