I’ve been working in mental health for over 30 years — in psychiatric hospitals, residential and community programs, employee assistance programs, and private practice. That range matters to me. It means I’ve sat with people in real crisis, not just in carefully contained settings.

My training spans somatic therapies, attachment-based work, depth psychology, and energy-based practices. But training is only part of it. My own sustained inner work has shaped this practice just as much. I don’t think you can hold depth with someone else that you haven’t been willing to go to yourself.

Over time my understanding of how healing happens has shifted. I’ve moved away from a fixing model and toward something more like accompaniment — trusting the intelligence of the nervous system, making room for what an experience is carrying, and slowing down enough to listen. Awareness, connection, and integration tend to emerge when the conditions are right. They don’t respond well to being forced.

In recent years my work has increasingly focused on the relationship between trauma, embodiment, and the journey back to oneself — themes that run through my forthcoming book, Sparks of the Ruby Slippers.

Each person who comes to work with me brings a path that is entirely their own. I try to meet it that way.

At the core of this work is a belief I hold deeply: that every person is fundamentally good, loveable, and resilient. It is something I have come to trust through years of sitting with people in their hardest moments, and through walking my own difficult road.

It’s the wounding that creates the struggles — the fears we attach to, the nervous system wounds beneath them, the ways we learned to survive that eventually stop serving us. None of that is a character flaw. Often, it is what pain, overwhelm, or disconnection looks like when it has not had space, support, or safety to be fully processed.

I believe healing is a return — to a self that was always there, before the hurt layered over it. Not a fixed or finished self, but a more sovereign one. More like who you actually were before the world told you otherwise.

This work isn’t about pathologizing what’s wrong with you. It’s about getting curious about where the hurt came from, and what it’s been trying to protect.