My path to counseling started long before I became a counselor.
For more than 16 years, I worked in behavioral health, including six years as the CEO of an organization serving people with substance use disorders. I spent those years surrounded by questions about change: what makes it possible, what gets in its way, and why insight alone is so rarely enough.
What interested me most was always the person underneath the problem. The relationships, histories, contradictions, defenses, expectations, and identities that shape how we move through the world, often without realizing how much they’re shaping us.
That curiosity eventually changed the direction of my own life, too. I left executive leadership and returned to graduate school to study counseling.
I’m endlessly curious about why people do what they do, but I’m equally interested in everything that makes a person themselves: what they care about, what makes them laugh, what they’re embarrassed to admit they love, what they’re still figuring out, and what they want their life to feel like when nobody else gets a vote.
I believe people are more interesting than their problems.
Outside the therapy room, I’m usually somewhere between graduate school, an overly ambitious project at home, writing, spending time with people I love, and negotiating with my dog about who actually owns the furniture. I have strong opinions about interiors, an unreasonable affection for strange old things, and very little interest in pretending adulthood means having everything figured out.