Move from Pain to Purpose

Who I work with

You may have come to this page because something in your life has changed — or is changing — and can no longer be set aside. An illness, yours or someone you love. A death. A relationship in trouble. A major decision or a chapter ending. Or a quieter, harder-to-name sense that the way you've been living no longer fits.

This is the kind of moment my clients tend to arrive in. Here is the work I do most often:

Adults working through complex trauma and relationship patterns — early-life wounds that keep showing up in adult relationships, in work, in the body, or in a persistent sense of not quite belonging to your own life. This is depth work, not symptom management.

Adults navigating major life transitions — a career change or collapse, divorce, becoming a parent, leaving a faith or community, immigration and cultural adjustment, the end of a long chapter, or the beginning of one you didn't plan for. Transitions tend to surface what was underneath all along; often, this is when long-buried patterns or trauma finally ask to be addressed.

Caregivers and partners of people with serious or chronic illness — including cancer, dementia, and autoimmune or GI conditions like ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease. Being the well one is its own kind of weight: exhaustion, guilt, resentment, and a slow erosion of who you used to be. That weight often has nowhere to go. It is somewhere here.

Adults facing serious illness or end-of-life concerns, your own or a loved one's. Anticipatory grief, fear of death, life review, and the existential questions that arrive with a difficult diagnosis are central to my work. With grieving clients, the work is often from mourning to meaning — not bypassing the loss, but discovering what it is asking of the life that continues.

People who have had near-death experiences, spiritually transformative experiences, or other unusual events that don't fit neat categories. If you've had something happen that you don't know where to bring — that felt too strange, too sacred, or too unsettling to mention to your last therapist — you can bring it here. These experiences are welcomed, not pathologized. I have published research in this area and serve on the Academic and Research Committee of the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS).

Adults in midlife and later life facing role and identity shifts — retirement, an empty nest, late divorce, a serious diagnosis, the discovery that an outwardly successful life feels hollow inside, or the work of making sense of a life as it is being lived more deeply.

My clients span adulthood. Many are men in their 20s and 30s working through trauma, relationship patterns, identity, or career direction, and men in midlife and beyond who come to therapy when something finally makes it unavoidable — a health scare, a loss, a relationship in trouble, or a quiet sense that the way they've been living no longer fits. I also work closely with women across adulthood — younger clients in their 20s and 30s navigating early-life trauma, relationship patterns, and life direction, and women in midlife and beyond facing caregiving, grief, identity shifts, or long-buried trauma surfacing later in life. Some of my clients have been in therapy before; for others, it's their first time. What they tend to share is a wish for substantive depth work rather than coping techniques alone.

I welcome clients of all sexual orientations and gender identities.