The mind narrates.
The body decides.
People come to therapy hoping to feel different — less stuck, less alone, more themselves. After more than 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
Six couples, two days on Mercer Island, four times a year. The same work I do in the room — only slower, with the time and quiet for it to land. Not a weekend of skills to take home, but what's underneath them: reaching for each other, and being met. I lead it with Joe Nelson, and a clinician or two who help hold the room.
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 More
Postgraduate 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 MoreSelected writing
On how change actually happens
in relationships and in the body.
Secure Ground:
A Gestalt-Attachment Integration
What actually changes a person isn't insight or technique — it's the experience of being met. This one begins with an ordinary Thursday in the consulting room, then builds, slowly, into the framework beneath my work: presence, attachment, and the ground that has to be there before anything can shift.
Read the piece →Secure Ground: The Architecture
A closer look at how it's actually built — the moving parts beneath settled presence, contact, and earned security.
An Introduction to Gestalt Therapy
The ground floor, not the whole building — a plain-language introduction to the tradition my work grows from. Written for the clinicians I train, but open to anyone curious about how this way of working thinks.
"What heals isn't perfection.
It's the return."
— after rupture, after distance, after disconnection
More than 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.
Begin 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 free 15-minute video conversation with me. It isn't an interview — it's how we both feel out whether the work is a fit, and your chance to ask me anything before deciding.
Schedule a Conversation