THERAPY IS A PLACE 
TO TRANSFORM PAIN INTO MEANING.

The neighborhood where I grew up was declared a "war-zone" by Boston city officials in the 90's. Addiction, poverty, violence, and deep racial divides plagued most systems that were meant to support me.

Nobody I knew went to therapy. That wasn't a thing. My community leaned on the Catholic Church for relief, ritual, and for self-understanding, but the church did not encourage self-reflection or contemplation; it enforced loyalty, rule-following and shame, waging its own war on the human soul by discouraging creativity, vulnerability, and queerness in all of its forms. My generation left the pews and turned to opioids and heroine instead for an experience of medicine and nurture. I turned to my imagination, hiding out in my bedroom for years at a time, reading book after book. Despite my disconnect, I knew I was queer at an early age, and my queerness became my bridge to other worlds. 

I had to leave in order to come out. I succeeded in that - I made new kinds of friends, I went to college on a full scholarship, I traveled. I had escaped. I had survived. But the war was not over. 

​

Although I went on functioning, I felt detached from myself, plagued by occasional panic, far from my emotions and my own vulnerability. My low self-worth showed up repeatedly in romance, in work, in life-choices. I was avoidant. I had many relationships, but little intimacy. I didn't know at the time that this feeling constituted the double life that most trauma survivors navigate inside of themselves - a painful psychic split, a feeling of deep self-alienation. 

​

But the red thread was always there, a subtle, yet potent, guiding force, a longing. I became a seeker. I found meditation at 23, 12-step work at 24, then therapy at 25. My first therapist wasn't that great, but the space to talk was transformative. Three therapists later, I was unlocking childhood trauma, re-finding the pieces of me that I’d left behind. With enough support, I could finally stop avoiding and start paying attention, stop pushing and start belonging, finding the courage and the safety to come back home - to myself, to this beautiful, complicated world. 

​

Healing became my primary focus. I eventually enrolled in a Counseling Psychology graduate program in California because I wanted to give back what I had received, to study consciousness and change.

Healing continues to be my primary focus, but my interests have expanded beyond  traditional western therapeutics. I am currently studying Deep Ecology, Eco-psychology, Wilderness Guiding, and Indigenous Epistemologies. I am developing an interest in holding group spaces for climate anxiety, a passion for praxis and theory that move the psychology field out of its entrapment in individualism and white supremacy toward a deeper, ecological systems theory, and supporting people to build stronger relationships with the more than human world. 

My passions and hobbies include - dogs (mine and yours), writing (non fiction and fiction), birds, coyote (the archetypal and the actual), clouds, The Mystery, naturalism, deep time, cosmology, consciousness, place-based attachment, educating, learning, being imperfect, and deep, deep rest.

​

Due to the details of my own journey, I work well with people who grew up in one place but find themselves in another. You are resilient, you have done the work, but there is still a block to letting the old ways die, and stepping fully  in to your own becoming. First and foremost, therapy is a relationship. So let's meet and see if we like each other. 

​

​

​