How I Work
How I Work
The relationship we have with ourselves shapes our experience of life. That relationship deepens through curiosity and contact.
An Experiential Approach
We’ve all experienced the gap between knowing and feeling. We might know we’re safe, capable, and valued — and still feel anxious, doubtful, or unworthy. This is where insight-based therapy sometimes reaches a limit. And why I turn to experiential approaches.
Experiential work engages the emotional patterns and memories that dwell beneath conscious awareness. It might involve following a sensation in the body to see what it holds, exploring the protective intention of a familiar reaction, or meeting a younger part that carries an emotional wound from the past. For the deepest change, something needs to land physically and emotionally, not just in the mind.
I draw primarily from Internal Family Systems, integrating methods from Hakomi, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, EMDR, and Coherence Therapy. These approaches share a focus on working with experience directly, as it occurs in the present moment.
The Relationship
The therapeutic relationship is central to the work. Being met with genuine attention and understanding builds the trust that allows deeper exploration. Over time, the relationship can reflect tendencies that operate in other parts of life — perhaps the pull to perform, the impulse to withdraw, or maybe the fear of being too much or not enough. These become trailheads worth exploring.
Supporting Practices
The work is primarily experiential, though I also help people build practices that support movement between sessions. I've developed extensive resources covering sleep, meditation, habit building, values exploration, and other foundations of wellbeing. For those drawn to them, these practices and the experiential work reinforce each other.
Possibilities
As this work deepens, people often experience relief from persistent struggles, healing of old wounds, greater presence in relationships, and a renewed sense of vitality and wholeness. The inward turn completes itself as we face outward again. Our internal shifts reshape how we meet life: less bound by past conditioning, with fuller access to ourselves and more flexibility in how we respond to life's demands.
Beyond the outcomes, there's value in the journey itself. We are exploring one of the most fascinating places in the universe after all — our own interior and how it expresses itself in our lives. This becomes a way of living more intentionally, more rooted in who we really are.
Guiding Principles
My work rests on a set of principles that have taken shape over the years. Here are a few of them:
Awareness is the master key.
As our awareness deepens—of thoughts, emotions, reactions, and bodily experience—we gain new ways of relating to ourselves and the world.
The body is a doorway.
Reconnecting to the body's felt sense is both a source of aliveness and delight and an invaluable pathway for accessing implicit memory and supporting lasting change.
STRENGTHS ARE PART OF THE WORK.
Acknowledging and savoring our capacities and what nourishes us is as important as addressing our wounds.
Therapy is a path of reconnection.
At its core, much of this work is about healing disconnection — within ourselves, with others, and with the living world around us.
Below the Surface
Some of our most limiting patterns endure no matter how clearly we see them. We may understand their origins and triggers perfectly well, and still find them playing out as they always have. That’s because these patterns are held deeper than the thinking mind — in what’s known as implicit memory.
But under the right conditions, these deep patterns can change. When old expectations meet new, contradictory experience in a felt way, the emotional learning at the root can actually be revised — a process researchers call memory reconsolidation.
It’s not necessary to understand the theory to benefit from the work, but for those interested in the clinical and research perspective, I’ve written a short piece that goes deeper.
Working with Parts
At the heart of my practice is Internal Family Systems (IFS), a model that recognizes the mind’s natural multiplicity. We all have aspects or parts—for example, the part that pushes for achievement and the one that wants to rest, or the part that yearns for more connection and the one that holds back.
IFS offers a way to get to know these parts and create more adaptive, aligned relationships with them. As we learn about parts, we also come to experientially know what is not a part—our deeper nature, imbued with qualities like clarity, calm, and compassion. Learning to live more from what IFS calls Self opens into territory that goes well beyond healing. For many, this becomes a path of ongoing discovery, where psychological work and spiritual exploration meet.
The Role of Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP)
In certain cases, I offer Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy. Ketamine has well-documented anxiolytic and antidepressant effects, but there’s more to how it supports deep psychological work.
Ketamine’s psychedelic properties can open us to novel experiences with old material. It quiets the default mode network—the brain activity associated with our habitual defenses and self-referential thinking—creating space for contact with emotions and memories that usually stay guarded. And its effects on neuroplasticity may help new insights and emotional shifts take root and stick.
I view ketamine as a catalyst. My background as a depth-oriented psychotherapist shapes how I prepare clients, hold space during sessions, and support the integration work that follows.