How I Work
Most of what shapes us operates outside of our awareness: the assumptions we make about others, the roles we inhabit, and the adaptations that continue to organize our relationships long after the circumstances that created them have passed.
My work is psychodynamic and relational, informed by existential and psychoanalytic perspectives. I am interested in the underlying patterns, meanings, and emotional dynamics that shape how people experience themselves and their relationships.
I also draw from family systems thinking to understand how ways of relating are carried across generations. The burdens people bring to therapy, including chronic guilt, over-responsibility, difficulty identifying their own needs, or feeling trapped in familiar relationship patterns, often make more sense when viewed within the broader context of family history and emotional inheritance.
This work unfolds at a pace slow enough to notice what usually gets missed. Over time, experiences that once felt confusing, automatic, or fixed become available for reflection, understanding, and change.
Areas of focus include:
• Growing up with a narcissistic or emotionally unavailable parent, including experiences of chronic invalidation, emotional role reversal, and conditional love
• Persistent guilt, over-responsibility, and difficulty setting boundaries
• Complex family relationships and intergenerational patterns
• Identity, meaning, and questions of who you are and how you want to live
• Mood and anxiety concerns
• Substance use and recovery, including harm reduction approaches
These concerns are understood within the relational contexts where they develop, rather than as diagnoses alone.
who i work with
This approach tends to be most helpful for people interested in exploring patterns, relationships, and self-understanding over time. If you're looking primarily for a brief, skills-based approach or a highly structured treatment model, another style of therapy may be a better fit.
fit
I often work with adults who feel caught between responsibility and self-erasure, people who grew up learning to be highly capable, independent, or attentive to the needs of others, and now want to understand the cost of those adaptations.
They are often the people others rely on. They know how to hold things together, anticipate problems, and care for those around them. Yet beneath that competence there can be a persistent sense of guilt, difficulty recognizing their own needs, or the feeling that something essential has gone missing.
Many describe feeling disconnected from themselves without fully understanding why.
If this way of working resonates, the next step is simply to reach out and begin a conversation.
How I Show Up
I am present, curious, and honest. My thinking has been shaped by long engagement with art and music, disciplines that taught me to listen for what is implied, unfinished, or held quietly beneath the surface. I think in patterns and attend carefully to detail. I am drawn to what gets left out of the story, and what shows up sideways in the room between us.
I pay attention to how we relate to one another, especially moments of tension, hesitation, or misunderstanding, because these often mirror the very patterns that bring people to therapy. I bring a harm reduction lens to questions of substances and compulsive behavior, without assumptions about what recovery should look like.
No one arrives in therapy in isolation. Questions of belonging, exclusion, power, family, and circumstance are often inseparable from the struggles people bring.
Professional Background
My formal training is in counseling psychology with a focus on addiction, and my undergraduate background is in art, specifically black and white darkroom photography.
Before training as a therapist, I spent more than a decade in specialty coffee, including as general manager of a bustling café and as a competitive barista. That work taught me a lot about attention, craft, and what it means to show up consistently for people.
I hold licensure as a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor (LCPC) in Illinois and am board certified as a National Certified Counselor (NCC) through the National Board for Certified Counselors. I also hold certification as an Alcohol and Drug Counselor (CADC), am a Certified Group Psychotherapist through the Institute for the Advancement of Group Therapy, and a certified SMART Recovery facilitator. My clinical training has included additional focus in psychodynamic, relational, and existential approaches.
