The mind narrates.
The body decides.
People come to therapy hoping to feel different — less stuck, less alone, more themselves. After twenty years of doing this work, what I've learned is that change doesn't come from understanding. It comes from a particular kind of experience: being with another person, in real time, while what's underneath gets met.
We are not built to regulate alone. This is the foundation everything I do is built on — the recognition that we discover ourselves in the presence of another, not in isolation. My work draws on three traditions: Gestalt therapy's depth of presence, contemporary attachment science, and the neuroscience of how the body builds emotion before the mind names it.
Four ways
I work
All grounded in the same clinical foundation.
Each suited to a different need or moment.
Couples Therapy
For couples who want to build earned security — the kind of secure bond that holds through difficulty and deepens over time. You may be caught in patterns of disconnection that you can't seem to interrupt. You may struggle to repair after rupture as quickly as you'd like. You may have lost your playfulness, or simply want to deepen the bond you already have. The patterns we get stuck in aren't personality flaws or failures of effort. They're something a relationship learns to do — protective moves that once made sense and no longer fit who you're trying to become together. Together we slow the disconnection down enough to see what's underneath it, and build the moments where both of you reach with vulnerability and meet each other's reach with comfort and care. This is where real change happens — not in insight, but in lived experience.
Learn MoreSafe Harbor Retreat
A two-day retreat for six couples, four times a year, on Mercer Island. The clearest distillation of how I work — depth, presence, real change in the room. Joined by Joe Nelson. Limited to six couples per retreat by design.
Learn MoreIndividual Therapy
For adults doing the slow work of feeling more at home within yourself. You may be living automatic patterns that don't meet your needs. You may be navigating complex grief, the aftermath of a breakup, or the quieter sense that something needs to shift even if you can't yet name what. You already know that knowing isn't enough. The same situations keep arriving. The same reactions keep happening. What changes that isn't more insight — it's a different kind of attention. Together we slow it down enough to feel what's actually happening in your body. The present can be met differently than the past, and being met by another is part of how that becomes possible.
Learn MorePostgraduate Training
A four-weekend experiential intensive at Seattle Gestalt & Attachment (SGA), the postgraduate training program I co-founded with Joseph Nelson. For EFT therapists deepening their work, Gestalt therapists building out the attachment dimension of their practice, and clinicians ready to integrate what these traditions each know into a coherent way of being in the room.
Learn MoreRecent essays
On how change actually happens
in relationships and in the body.
What Actually Happens
in the Therapy Room
A scene from a Thursday afternoon, and what it reveals about how nervous systems find each other before words arrive.
Read the Essay →Secure Ground: A Gestalt-Attachment Integration
The framework I've been developing — settled presence, the secure field that emerges between two people, and the secure ground a client carries forward.
How Emotion Works
On the body budget, why the past keeps running you, and what it means that emotion is constructed rather than received.
"What heals isn't perfection.
It's the return."
— after rupture, after distance, after disconnection
Twenty years
of doing this work
I came to this work to understand how connection happens, how healing happens, and — mostly — to heal myself. I fell in love with being a therapist along the way, and twenty years later, I'm still in love with it. The work of walking alongside people committed to growth and connection is what I'm here for.
My training is rooted in Gestalt therapy and emotionally focused therapy. I'm deeply grounded in attachment science and the neuroscience of how the body builds emotion before the mind names it. My thinking has been shaped by Resnick, Burley, Johnson, Barrett, Buber, and the long line of clinicians and theorists who saw the relational nature of being human before the science caught up.
I co-founded Seattle Gestalt & Attachment (SGA) with Joseph Nelson, the postgraduate training program where we now teach this integration together. I live and practice in Seattle.
Read MoreBegin with a
conversation.
Whether you're considering couples therapy, the Safe Harbor retreat, individual work, or the postgraduate training, the first step is the same: a 20-minute video conversation with me. This isn't an interview. It's how I make sure the work is the right fit, and how you get to ask anything you want before committing.