My Approach to Therapy

I work with adults navigating anxiety and OCD, depression, grief and loss, relationship difficulties, and questions of identity and meaning. My approach has shifted, over time and through clinical experience, toward frameworks that center your own knowledge of yourself rather than treating therapy as a process of expert interpretation applied from the outside. I draw primarily from person-centered, humanistic, and trauma-informed traditions, with some influence from relational and attachment-informed ways of thinking, because I find that how early relational experiences shape present patterns, and how we relate to each other in the room, is itself a source of information and, often, of change.

What I mean by person-centered is not simply that I am warm or that I follow your lead, though both of those things are true. I mean that I take seriously the idea that you are already a meaning-maker, that you have been making sense of your experience your entire life, and that the frameworks you have developed, however painful or limiting some of them may have become, have logic to them. Part of what we do together is try to understand that logic, with curiosity rather than judgment, and to ask what might be possible now that perhaps was not before.

A trauma-informed orientation shapes the way I think about pacing, safety, and power. Many of the patterns people bring to therapy, including anxiety, self-criticism, difficulty trusting others, a sense of being stuck or of not quite belonging in their own life, make sense as responses to experiences that were, at some point, genuinely overwhelming. Naming that is not about locating a cause and calling it resolved. It is about approaching yourself, and your history, with more compassion and less blame. It is also about recognizing that a therapy relationship, like any relationship involving a real power differential, requires ongoing attention to whose comfort and whose agenda is being centered.

My practice is also shaped by humanistic traditions, by the conviction that people have an inherent capacity for growth, self-understanding, and the construction of meaning, and that those capacities do not need to be installed by a therapist so much as they need room to unfold. Existential questions, about what matters, about how to live with uncertainty and loss, about who you are and want to become, form the foundation of my therapeutic orientation.

I integrate evidence-based approaches including Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), Inference-based CBT (I-CBT), and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), used not as protocols to move through but as tools I draw on when they are genuinely useful for the particular person in front of me.

Who this work tends to fit

People who find this approach useful are often those who want to be met as a whole person rather than organized around a diagnosis. They may have had experiences in which their knowledge of themselves was dismissed or overridden, whether in medical settings, in relationships, or in prior therapy, and are looking for something that takes their own understanding seriously. They are often people for whom the standard frameworks have not quite fit, whether because of queer identity, neurodivergence, chronic illness, trauma history, or simply a sense that their inner life is more complicated than the available categories suggest.

What tends to shift

Change in this kind of therapy is often less linear than people expect, and sometimes harder to name than they would like. What people often describe, over time, is a shift in their relationship to themselves: a loosening of the authority of the harshest internal voices, more room to feel things without being flooded by them, a growing capacity to distinguish between what they were taught to believe about themselves and what they actually think. Patterns that once felt like fixed features of personality begin to feel more contingent, more open to question. This is slow work, often, but it also tends to be long-lasting.

Beginning therapy together

The first step is a free fifteen-minute consultation where we can talk about what brings you to therapy and whether working together feels like a good fit.