Approach
In the same way that reading a score is not the same as hearing its melody suspended in the air, this page can tell you something of how I think about the work, and of where I trained; what it cannot tell you is what it is like to sit with me. Only the experience itself, which we create together, can. So read it for the first — and, should you decide to meet with me, trust your own sense of the second.
People do not always arrive at this work because something is egregiously wrong. More often, something is quietly off: a pattern that keeps repeating despite a strong desire for change — and every resolution; a success that does not land the way it was supposed to; a sense of disconnection, of living at some distance from one's own life. Often that life is, by every outside measure, going well. Sometimes a turning point — a new role, an ending, a loss, even a triumph — has stirred more than it seemed it should. My work is concerned with understanding that distance, and with giving it the time and care it deserves.
In psychotherapy, symptoms — when they are present — are where we start, not where we stop. They are real, they deserve relief, and they usually get it; depth is not a detour around what hurts. But what I want us both to understand is the person in whom they arise: how early experience and relationship shape what we expect, avoid, and reach for, often without our knowing it. Not everyone arrives with a symptom; some come simply wanting to understand themselves better. Either way the direction is the same — from the trouble or wish at hand, to the patterns that keep showing up, to a life lived more fully as your own.
It has been my experience that when that kind of understanding takes hold, and the desire for change is genuinely present, change tends to follow of its own accord — less a project than a matter of course. Some of it arrives quietly, as if on its own. Some has to be worked through, at your pace — gently, or more persistently — before it holds.
The practice also keeps a second, differently shaped line of work: clinical hypnosis. It is brief, directed at a single aim, and offered for a few concerns where it has been well studied — specific, and often bodily: insomnia, anxiety before a medical or dental procedure, menopausal hot flashes.
My way of working is also a good fit for people whose own work is helping and understanding others — physicians, nurses, therapists — who want the same care and attention turned toward themselves.
What this work is
Much of what brings people to therapy is, at root, human. We feel unseen. We feel alone. A connection that mattered has thinned, or hurt us, or ended. And decades of research keep returning the same finding: what helps most in therapy is not any single technique, but the relationship itself — the experience of being accurately, patiently seen (Flückiger et al., 2018).
But not all seeing is the same. It matters that the mind doing the seeing has spent years learning how minds work — the conscious and unconscious currents of a life, the traps laid by circumstance and the subtler ones we lay for ourselves, and how often the two conspire. That is what depth of training is for: hearing not only what is said, but what organizes it.
You are a person, with all the contradictory, astounding mystery that being a person entails. Each of us carries an entire, singular universe within — much of it unmapped, much of it moving out of view. My work rests on a conviction formed over years of training and practice: that the sustained attention of one human being to another, in a relationship made for exactly that purpose, remains one of the most reliable ways we change — and one of the few that lasts.
Depth psychotherapy
Depth psychotherapy, as I practice it, is exploratory. It begins with what hurts or puzzles and goes to the root — not necessarily organized around a diagnosis or a protocol, but around you: where the patterns come from, what they are for, and how a life opens once they are understood.
The psychotherapy practiceClinical hypnosis
Clinical hypnosis is brief and directed at a single aim, offered for a few concerns where it has been well studied — insomnia, anxiety before a medical or dental procedure, menopausal hot flashes. A distinct service, available on its own and separately from the psychotherapy practice.