My path here
I started out as a neuroscience researcher, studying how people regulate emotion and change behavior. I came to the work I do now partly through what the research couldn't reach, and partly through my own healing, which is true of most people in this field, though not everyone says so.
What I kept running into was that understanding the mechanism wasn't the same as understanding the person. You can map the circuitry of fear or attachment in exact detail and still not touch what it's actually like to be a person who braces every time someone gets close. The brain science was real and useful, and it wasn't enough on its own. What seemed to actually change people was something older and more relational, being met, over time, by another person in a way that early life may not have provided.
That's the ground I work from now. The neuroscience didn't get left behind so much as it pointed past itself, toward the relationships that shape how safe it feels to be a person among other people, before there are words to describe what is missing.
What the work is
Most of us are running on patterns we never chose, habits of relating to ourselves and other people that were formed early and have mostly run in the background ever since. Some of them were good solutions to a real situation once. A lot of them are just old, and we've never actually stopped to look at them.
My approach is about bringing what's usually automatic into plain view, slowly, with a kind of attention that most of these patterns never had. Something changes when an old way of being is met that way, in the presence of another person rather than alone with it. Being seen clearly and steadily seems to make room for something else to come forward, less driven by old fear or deficiency, and more able to meet your life as it actually is.
Some people arrive needing to build something that wasn't there in the first place — a basic sense of safety and steadiness that early life didn't provide. Others are already stable and want to go further: less caught in old patterns, more present, more themselves. We move in whatever direction is actually needed rather than from some predetermined script.
Who I work with
I work with adults who want more than symptom relief and who sense that something isn't quite reaching them, whether life looks fine from the outside or hard. Common threads include:
Anxiety — not always the kind with an obvious cause, sometimes more a low background hum of vigilance or unease that's been running so long it feels like personality rather than something that could change.
Life transitions — a career shift, a relationship beginning or ending, becoming a parent, entering a new decade, or simply the quiet realization that a way of living has run its course.
Relationship patterns — the sense of repeating something you can see clearly and still can't seem to interrupt: pulling away when someone gets close, over-giving, losing yourself, choosing the same difficulty in a new form
Feeling stuck despite doing the work — for people who've read the books, done some therapy, maybe kept a meditation practice, and hit the wall where understanding a pattern hasn't been enough to change it. That gap between insight and change is often where the most interesting work begins.
A sense of living with something missing — competent, capable, and somehow not fully in your own life. Nothing is obviously wrong, which is part of what makes it hard to name, and it's a completely legitimate reason to come.
I also work with deeper attachment and developmental wounds when that's what's present — though it's never a requirement for this to be useful to you.
How I work
My clinical home base is attachment theory, specifically the model developed by Dr. Daniel Brown. Brown's central insight is that for people with significant early relational disruption, attachment repair has to come before trauma processing. The deficit in developmental trauma is often not an excess of overwhelming memory but the absence of someone reliably attuned to your inner world, whose steady attention you could eventually take in as your own.
Around that foundation I work with Internal Family Systems, mentalization-based approaches, somatic methods, and contemplative practice. Part of the process is discovering together as we go: what resonates, what a given moment seems to call for, what actually helps you rather than just interests you.
I work under the supervision of Tammy Brannen, LCSW at Creative Healing Center in Loveland, CO.
