The premise
Therapy isn’t simply about reducing symptoms or learning new coping skills. At its best, it expands what becomes possible. As familiar patterns loosen their grip, you begin to see more choices, respond with greater intention, and build a life that reflects your values rather than your automatic reactions.
Mode one
Direct, rigorous conversation of the kind that helps you see your patterns clearly, understand what they have been protecting, and clarify what you actually value. This is where existential and humanistic psychotherapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy do their work: examining avoidance, loosening the grip of unworkable stories, and connecting daily choices to what matters.
Draws on: existential–humanistic psychotherapy · ACT · attachment theory
Mode two
Direct work with emotion, imagery, focused attention, somatic awareness, and deeply learned automatic responses. Many of the patterns that run your life were learned through experience and can change through new experiences: staying with an emotion you would usually avoid, trying a different response in a familiar situation, or noticing a bodily cue before an automatic reaction takes over.
Draws on: Gestalt principles · clinical hypnosis · mindfulness · imagery · emotional processing · mind-body methods
Most sessions move between the two. When analysis runs in circles, we drop into experience; when experience is confusing, we step back and think. We continue moving between them until we’re making progress again.
Where the experiential depth comes from
Before becoming a psychotherapist, I spent over fifteen years as a hypnosis practitioner, trainer, and coach. I conducted more than 6,200 session hours, helped hundreds of people quit smoking and change deeply ingrained habits, and trained over a hundred practitioners in experiential change methods. I studied clinical hypnosis, Humanistic Neuro-Linguistic Psychology, Core Transformation, regression hypnotherapy, somatic interventions, and focused attention techniques. I presented at the National Institutes of Health, taught at professional conferences for several consecutive years, and built educational content including a library of guided breathing and awareness practices.
What eventually brought me to graduate-level clinical work wasn't dissatisfaction with those methods. They work, often remarkably well. I came to see that using techniques without a real therapeutic relationship, and without the depth to address the larger questions people carry about meaning, identity, and connection, can produce change that doesn't last. I earned my M.Ed. in Counseling, with a Clinical Mental Health concentration, at George Mason University, not as a career change, but to bring formal clinical training and licensure to the experiential work I was already doing.
That background brings years of disciplined practice to the experiential methods I use and has taught me both what they can do and where they fall short.
By the numbers
20+
years studying attention, suggestion, and experiential change
6,200+
hours of hypnosis, coaching, and mind-body sessions
100+
practitioners trained in experiential methods
Common questions
For most adults and couples, yes. Virtual sessions can be every bit as substantive as in-person sessions, and meeting virtually can make therapy easier to sustain without travel. Some people prefer being in the room; if that matters to you, mention it early, since office availability is limited.
Individual sessions are typically weekly, especially at the start. Sessions run 50–55 minutes, whether individual or couples (Discernment Counseling is the exception, with longer sessions). The overall length of therapy depends on your goals. Some work is focused and brief, some is deeper and longer. I'll talk this through with you honestly as we go.
Yes. Therapy is confidential, with the standard legal exceptions (risk of serious harm to yourself or others, abuse of a child or vulnerable adult, or a court order). I'll walk you through all of it before your first session.
That's a fine place to start. The consultation is brief and focused, not a sales call. If what you need is something else, I'll say so.