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Who I work with

Adults in the middle of it.

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The ones who'd get "adjustment disorder" on the paperwork when it's actually the whole thing. High-functioning, high-achieving, and tired in a way sleep doesn't touch. People in transition. People who've done therapy before and left wondering if it was them.

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Men. Athletes, current and former. Academics. Other therapists.

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Our field isn't especially good with those groups. I don't think that's because they're hard to help. I think the work took more precision than it got.

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What the work is

Talking. Direct.

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I ask a lot of questions early because I want to know how things actually run for you before I start suggesting anything. I'll tell you what I'm seeing instead of waiting for you to find it yourself. Sometimes I'll be wrong. I'll say so.

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We spend less time naming what's wrong with you and more time on what you're already doing that works, what it costs, and what you want your life built around. Most people arrive with more capacity than they're getting credit for, including from themselves. Usually it's been aimed at getting through the week rather than at anything they chose.

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When it's useful, we bring the body in. A lot of what people call thinking is happening somewhere lower.

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Some people come for three months with one specific thing. Some stay years. I'll tell you what I think you need. I'll also tell you when I think you're done.

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I keep the practice small. I'd rather do a few things well.

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I'll tell you the truth kindly, and I won't waste your time.

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Why "recalibrates"

Most therapy picks a direction early and holds it. That's fine if the problem stays the same shape. It usually doesn't.

What you came in for is often not what we end up working on. What helped in month two stops helping by month six.

That's not failure. That's a person changing. It's also the exact point where a lot of therapy quietly stops being useful and nobody says it out loud.

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So I keep asking. Is this still the problem. Is this still working. What's different.

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I'd rather change the approach than defend it. If something isn't landing, say so. If I think we've drifted, I will.

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It takes as long as it takes

That's what I tell athletes, and it's true here too.

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You are not behind. You are not a project with a deadline. Whatever you built to survive something worked, or you wouldn't be here reading this, and I'm not interested in tearing it out before we know what it was holding up.

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So we go at the speed the work actually goes. Some things move fast. Some take a year. Neither one means anything about you.

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Who I am when I'm not doing this

I'm a co-parent to a vivacious, energetic, incredible girl. I live in East Boston, in the same neighborhood where I practice, which means I run into my life at the grocery store like everyone else.

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I teach undergraduates, which keeps me honest. I coach CrossFit and teach yoga, which keeps me in a body instead of just thinking about one. I also just do it, for no one's benefit but mine. I lift. I read a lot. I run slowly and sign up for things anyway for the fun of it. 

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I write, mostly to figure out what I think.

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And I built this practice from nothing in my forties, after twenty years of doing this work inside other people's institutions. I mention that because I've spent a career studying how people change, and I did it recently enough to remember what it actually feels like.

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Where I trained

Hard rooms.

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A center for kids who set fires. An acute psychiatric hospital. A juvenile probation facility. A California state prison, where I ran groups and did risk evaluations alongside custody staff and psychiatry.

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Nobody in those rooms was performing wellness. Nobody had chosen to be there. That's where I learned to hear what's actually driving something instead of what I'm being told, and how to build trust with someone who has no reason to hand it over. Both turn out to matter more in ordinary therapy than I expected.

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In CrossFit we train harder than we need to perform. Same idea. It doesn't mean your situation has to be extreme for me to take it seriously. Most of what I see now is ordinary in the way real life is ordinary. A job that's eating you. A marriage that changed shape. Grief that never got its turn. A body that stopped cooperating.

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The training just means nothing you bring is going to be too much.

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Where it started

My first co-op at Northeastern was on Harvard's Study of Adult Development. The long one. The one that eventually showed that the quality of your relationships predicts your health and happiness better than almost anything else.

I was nineteen. I had no idea what I was working on. Twenty years later I've built a practice around roughly that premise.

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At twenty-two I went to Scotland to work with kids getting ready to leave school, helping them reach services nobody had bothered to explain. Then criminology at Fresno State. Then a forensic doctorate in San Diego.

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None of that is a fancy education. It's a working one. I still teach in public higher ed, seventeen years in.

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The academic part

I'm a tenured Associate Professor of Behavioral Sciences at Fitchburg State. I teach assessment and diagnosis to graduate students training to be clinicians.

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That shapes how I think about diagnosis. A label gives me a category. It doesn't tell me what your mornings look like, what you built to get through them, or what it costs you to look this functional.

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I'm interested in the second part.

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Credentials

PsyD, Clinical Forensic Psychology, Alliant International University
MA, Clinical Forensic Psychology, Alliant International University
MS, Criminology, with distinction, California State University, Fresno
BS, Psychology, Northeastern University

Licensed Mental Health Counselor, Massachusetts
CrossFit Level 1 Trainer, Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT-200)

 

If this sounds like the room you've been looking for, book a 15 minute free consultation to see if I am the right fit for you. 

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