Services
About My Clients
Most people I work with look capable and steady on the outside and are carrying something underneath that hasn't resolved — anxiety that won't settle, the long aftereffects of trauma, a burnout a vacation doesn't touch, or a quieter sense that the life they've built doesn't quite fit the person living it. You don't have to look like you're struggling to belong here. If you'd rather understand a pattern than be handed a quick technique for it, this is that kind of work.
My Background and Approach
I'm a Licensed Professional Counselor with a master's in contemplative psychotherapy, adjunct faculty and clinical supervisor at Naropa University, and a member of the Denver Psychoanalytic Society. My work meets at psychoanalysis, existential inquiry, and twenty years of Buddhist practice. Before private practice I trained in psychiatric emergency services, addiction treatment, and as a graduate intern at a VA Vet Center working with PTSD, military sexual trauma, and combat trauma — so trauma and its long aftereffects are familiar ground. The work is depth-oriented rather than quick-fix: we follow the patterns that keep repeating, and build the steadiness that lets insight actually hold. I treat anxiety, trauma, burnout, and depression as worth understanding rather than only silencing — because what's understood at depth tends to stop running you from underneath.
My Personal Beliefs and Interests
I was born in Brazil and have lived in the U.S. for over twenty years. Alongside clinical work, I've spent more than two decades in Buddhist practice, and I teach and train in meditation, yoga, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, scuba, and free diving —disciplines that, in their own ways, are all about staying present when things get hard. I'm finishing a PhD in the science of stress and resilience, and I love to write. I recently created a Substack, have a book out - Nothing to Unlock - and a peer-reviewed paper on Camus, Sartre, and existentialism in the APA journal The Humanistic Psychologist. I believe people are far more capable than they feel, and that most suffering is less about what's missing than about what obscures a clearer view. I don't think of therapy as fixing a broken person or optimizing a working one — I think of it as reducing the distortion that keeps you from seeing, and living, clearly.