My Story

I didn’t begin my professional life planning to become a therapist.

My first training was in biology and neuroscience. I earned a bachelor’s degree in molecular biology, then a PhD in neuroscience, and later completed postdoctoral work in medical physics and neuroimaging. For many years, my work focused on biomedical research, trying to understand how the brain works, how symptoms emerge, and how complex systems fit together.

Over time, though, life pushed those questions in a more personal direction.

One of the most important turning points in my life was caring for my mother after her diagnosis with Alzheimer’s disease. That experience foundationally changed me. For all my training, and even expertise in Alzheimer's disease, I was at a loss to help myself or my mother on a human level. Serious illness is never just biological. It affects identity, memory, family roles, physical health, sense of purpose, and the emotional life of everyone involved. And the experience drove home just how fragmented healthcare can become when body, mind, relationship, and circumstance are treated as if they were separate problems.

In other words, the experience directly led me to becoming a psychotherapist.

I eventually returned to school for a master’s degree in marriage and family therapy, and my work now brings together both sides of my background: the scientific and the deeply human. Moreover, I became a neuropsychotherapist: I still care very much about brain and body biology, but I care just as much about what it feels like to live inside a life that has become confusing, painful, frightening, or hard to bear.

Today, I work primarily with individuals, especially those whose experiences are complex, overlapping, or difficult to fit neatly into a single diagnosis or treatment model. My work is especially oriented toward trauma, dissociation, schizophrenia-spectrum conditions, grief, depression and anxiety, and medically complicated situations. I also have a longstanding interest in how chronic illness, caregiving, and neurological conditions affect not only the person who is ill, but also the people around them.

That’s one reason medical family therapy remains an important part of how I think. Even when I’m working with one person, I’m often thinking systemically — about relationships, developmental history, family context, stressors, and the larger world that surrounds a symptom.

My therapeutic style is informed by neuropsychotherapy: therapy grounded in how the brain and nervous system actually work, while also taking seriously emotions, relationships, meaning, development, and lived experience. I’m also the developer of Embodied Depth Integration, or EDI, an integrative framework for deciding which therapeutic approaches may be most useful, when, and why.

In practice, that means I don’t start with a one-size-fits-all formula. I try to understand the person in front of me as fully as I can. From there, I draw from the approaches that seem most likely to help, whether that includes EMDR, experiential and somatic approaches, attachment and developmental work, mindfulness, depth-oriented psychotherapy, or other methods.

I’ve found that many people seeking therapy have already spent a long time trying to make sense of experiences that don’t fit easily into ordinary categories. They may feel “too complex,” too sensitive, too overwhelmed, too disconnected, or too hard to understand. I don’t see those experiences that way. More often, I see a person whose mind, body, history, and environment have been interacting in ways that deserve careful attention rather than simplistic explanations.

If there is a thread connecting my research life, my caregiving experience, and my clinical work, it’s probably this: I’ve spent a long time trying to understand complicated things with patience, curiosity, and respect. That’s the same spirit I try to bring into therapy.