Services
About My Clients
I'm skilled at working with relationship issues, including adults with narcissistic partners or narcissistic parents, trauma, anxiety including panic & OCD, depression, losses & life transitions, workplace issues, and a wide variety of other challenges. I also have specialties in psychedelic integration support and working with clients new to therapy.
My Background and Approach
I’m an experienced, interactive therapist who brings a compassionate heart, an active mind, and a calm presence to our collaboration. I’m direct and focused on the change you seek; using the words one of my teachers, Terry Real, uses to describe his approach, I avoid being “heavy on nurture and short on truth.” In our work, I’m deeply sensitive to, and celebrate, the differences among all human beings -- all the characteristics that make up our individual and collective identities. I use a “whole person” model, understanding and addressing any physical/biological, psychological/emotional, and social/relational components of what you wish to focus on in therapy and of what will lead to the growth, solutions, healing, and/or well-being you seek. I frequently give my clients things to work on between sessions. And I’m never far from my sense of humor.
My Personal Beliefs and Interests
In the 1990’s, in the midst of a long career in technology at such companies as Apple, I was trained as a volunteer grief counselor. Under the supervision of a licensed therapist, I provided counseling to clients who had had someone close to them die or were facing a terminal illness. After several years of volunteering, my new passion for counseling led me into a challenging career transition, returning to grad school for my M.S. in Counseling Psychology and ultimately becoming licensed as a psychotherapist in 2002. I was fortunate to train on a suicide hotline, in another grief counseling program, in a program serving low-income single mothers, as a school counselor, and in private practice under the supervision of noted couples and family therapist Dr. Rodney Shapiro. I’m a proud father of adult children, and I love to connect deeply with family and close friends, sing in community, and ride my bike — preferably with a bakery stop involved — in my spare time.