Therapeutic Approach

I have clinical training in Family Systems Therapy, Bowenian Family of Origin Therapy, Internal Family Systems Therapy, and the Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy. I have advanced clinical training in Internal Family Systems (IFS) and Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), and my work is trauma-informed. My graduate and post-graduate training has emphasized strength-based approaches to change and the capacity of the human body, mind, and spirit to heal.

I believe that within a safe, supportive context, our innate movement toward health can emerge. Once the burdens that constrain change have been identified, understood, and released, people and relationships can transform.

Establishing trust

The first step in good therapy is establishing trust in the relationship with your therapist: trust that the therapist is knowledgeable and experienced, will listen and really hear you, and can help in a safe way. Treatment with me begins with this important component. There is room throughout therapy for questions, concerns, doubts, and fears about any aspect of the process.

Working together

My therapy is collaborative. We work together to help you, your family, or your relationship find peace, happiness, and relief from suffering. Clients may be given reading or other assignments outside the therapy hour, and I sometimes encourage journaling about daily life and therapy experiences as a way of facilitating change.

With your permission, when needed, I collaborate with other health and mental-health providers. Any course of treatment is pursued only with your full informed consent. Some people find relief after gaining clarity about their problems; others choose to continue into deeper work so that change becomes more durable. You can always return to therapy when it is needed.

Advanced clinical training and mentorship

My clinical perspective has been shaped by advanced training, close supervision, and long-term mentorship with leaders whose work has influenced contemporary experiential, attachment-based, and systems-oriented psychotherapy. I have advanced clinical training through Level 2 AEDP and have received clinical supervision from AEDP founder Diana Fosha. I have also received direct clinical training and supervision from IFS founder Richard Schwartz, along with mentorship from David Calof.

One of the most formative relationships in my life as a therapist was my mentorship with Doug Anderson. Doug and I later wrote with Merle Jordan and Julia Bagley about mentorship and the intergenerational transmission of core values in clinical supervision. Doug offered more than knowledge or technique: he taught me how to care deeply for people. That kind of mentorship becomes part of a therapist’s way of seeing—how we listen, how we stay present when another person is suffering, and how we hold both rigor and tenderness in the same relationship.

Relationships like these shape the journey of a therapist, just as the therapeutic relationship shapes the journey of a client. We are changed not only by what we learn, but by the people who receive us, challenge us, believe in our development, and show us—through their own presence—what humane care looks like. I try to carry Doug’s influence into my work with clients and therapists: to treat each person as someone whose inner life deserves patience, seriousness, and genuine care.

These relationships continue to inform how I work: staying close to present-moment experience, tracking emotion and the nervous system, respecting the protective intelligence of symptoms and parts, and helping clients move toward greater freedom, connection, and choice.

Relationship as a path of awakening

I also spent time in mentorship with John Welwood, whose work helped me understand intimate relationship as more than a place where psychological wounds are reenacted or repaired. Relationship can become a path of awakening: a practice of meeting another person with presence, honesty, vulnerability, and love while remaining connected to one’s own deepest reality.

Welwood brought psychological and spiritual life into conversation without asking either one to replace the other. His work emphasizes that awakening is not an escape from the human world or from unfinished emotional work. It becomes more trustworthy when it is embodied in the way we relate—with ourselves, with the people we love, and with the ordinary difficulties of being human. In therapy, this means honoring both the personal history that shapes us and the larger capacities for awareness, compassion, freedom, and connection that can emerge through relationship.

This perspective is especially meaningful in couples work. The relationship can expose old patterns, but it can also become a living practice of conscious love: learning to stay present, tell the truth, receive the other person’s reality, and discover that greater awareness is not separate from how we care for one another.

David Calof and advanced parts work

My mentorship with David Calof included advanced parts-work supervision that deeply influenced how I understand inner multiplicity, protective patterns, and the therapeutic relationship. David’s own formation included mentorship from Milton Erickson, and his way of working carried forward a respect for the creative intelligence of the unconscious, the individuality of each person’s inner world, and the importance of meeting experience rather than imposing a theory upon it.

David’s teaching also helped me see the bridge between family-systems theory and multiplicity: inner parts can be understood relationally, as members of an internal system with histories, loyalties, conflicts, and protective roles. This way of thinking resonates with the theoretical ground from which Internal Family Systems emerged—bringing systems thinking into the inner life while treating multiplicity as meaningful rather than pathological. I carry that integration into my work with clients: listening for the relationships among parts, honoring what each part has tried to protect, and creating enough safety for new forms of cooperation and Self-leadership to become possible.

Chris Burris, a lead IFS trainer, describes David as one of the early parts-work teachers whose work was presented alongside Richard Schwartz and others at Networker conferences and explored in a study group. Burris recalls that David was beginning to apply parts work beyond dissociative identity disorder, while Schwartz drew from this wider clinical conversation, listened closely to clients, and organized and developed the ideas into the IFS model. I present this as an important influence and clinical lineage—not as a claim that David alone created IFS. Schwartz’s contribution was to formulate, refine, and systematize the model that became Internal Family Systems.