01
The early fascination
I became fascinated with how people change before I had clinical language for it. That curiosity took me through hypnosis, coaching, teaching, and eventually into psychotherapy. It started, though, when a friend introduced me to hypnosis as a teenager. I was hooked immediately. It was a version of psychology you could actually use, and I started practicing every chance I got.
One of my earliest real attempts involved a close friend whose tinnitus was tormenting him. Within hypnosis, I asked him to imagine a miniature Roto-Rooter moving through his ear canals, clearing away whatever seemed connected to the sound. I was improvising, but a few days later he told me it was bothering him much less. That stuck with me.
02
Going deep
I spent the next fifteen-plus years going deep into experiential change work. In college, I started a Hypnosis Club, practiced street hypnosis on campus, and began experimenting with Ericksonian hypnosis before pursuing formal training. I eventually became a certified hypnotist, instructor, and trainer.
I will admit the flashy, theatrical side of hypnosis is what caught my attention at first. Over time, I became much more interested in the moment when someone connected the dots and a problem that had felt permanent suddenly opened up.
I wanted to know why. When an intervention worked, what had actually changed? I started picturing problems almost like Tetris blocks: a pattern has a structure, and if you can see the structure clearly enough, you can find the one piece that lets the whole arrangement reorganize. That puzzle, more than any single technique, is what I kept chasing.
A problem that had felt permanent suddenly opened up.
Around that time, a colleague and I developed The Key to Freedom, a coaching program combining hypnosis with values clarification, identity work, and goal setting. It was my first run at a question I have been asking ever since: how does a person turn understanding into something they can feel, practice, and actually do?
Around this time, I became interested in Core Transformation, a method that works with difficult inner patterns by accessing the deeper needs or states beneath them. I became certified in the method and later assisted Tamara Andreas in local trainings I helped organize.
I studied regression hypnotherapy extensively, including an intensive Advanced Age Regression Hypnotherapy training in Utah with a small group of practitioners who already had substantial experience in hypnosis and related methods. Although I no longer practice regression work, I have kept some of the experiential skills and clinical understanding I developed through it.
Around the same time, I also developed experience with Emotional Freedom Techniques, often called tapping, as well as bilateral stimulation, somatic methods, and other approaches to deeply entrenched patterns.
Later I completed the trainer certification in Humanistic Neuro-Linguistic Psychology with John Overdurf, one of its founders. HNLP gave shape to ideas I had been circling for years and pushed my reading further into psychotherapy itself, including family therapists like Virginia Satir and Jay Haley.
None of this was purely academic or professional. I used many of these methods in my own life, alongside years of meditation and contemplative practice. Experiencing their effects firsthand taught me to respect both their power and their limits.
03
Teaching, training, and practice
For many years, this was my primary work. I conducted more than 6,200 hours of hypnosis and coaching sessions focused on concerns such as smoking cessation, weight change, sleep, fears, pain, stress, and self-defeating habits. I taught more than forty trainings and professional events, including intensive certification programs, and certified more than a hundred practitioners in hypnosis and HNLP.
I co-led a DC-area hypnosis Meetup that hosted educational events and visiting trainers. For several years, I presented talks at the National Guild of Hypnotists Annual Conference on hypnotic language and on how memory and imagination shape a person’s relationship to the past and future. I also maintained a professional blog, publishing more than fifty articles about hypnosis and the broader process of personal change.
My interest in language and influence eventually extended beyond individual change work. From 2018 to 2020, I co-hosted Subliminally Correct, a podcast examining how politicians and media figures use rhetoric, framing, and persuasion. The project sharpened my awareness of how public narratives shape private experience, especially in the Washington, DC area, where politics is rarely just something on the news.
04
The limits of technique
People often came to sessions hoping hypnosis would be a silver bullet for a specific problem. To be honest, part of the difficulty was that I could often help them get what they came for, and sometimes the change was dramatic. In only a few sessions, people would get over a fear, stop a habit they had struggled with for years, or make a change they had begun to think was impossible.
But the success of that work could also conceal what remained untouched. Someone would quit smoking and still go home to a marriage that wasn’t working. A fear would fade, but the self-doubt underneath it wouldn’t. The bigger questions, like what gave a person’s life meaning or what kind of life they were actually building, were outside the scope of a few appointments.
A behavior could change while the person still felt stuck or out of touch with themselves.
The structure of the work began to feel limiting too. I was continually meeting new people, learning enough about them to intervene quickly, and trying to create meaningful change almost immediately. Over time, I began to feel like a change artist on a hamster wheel: repeatedly beginning relationships, but rarely having enough time to know someone deeply or to understand the larger context of their life.
There was also an identity to give up. I had taken pride in making sure hypnosis happened in the first session, in being the person who could see the pattern quickly and know what to do with it. Eventually, I began reaching the limits of what I could understand and address within the hypnosis framework alone, and I learned that trying to move too quickly could mean missing something important.
What this taught me clinically was that lasting change has to reach both layers: the automatic responses that experiential methods can shift, and the broader values, relationships, and self-understanding that give those shifts somewhere to live.
05
The turn to psychotherapy
That realization brought me to graduate training in psychotherapy. It was both a continuation and a break. I had been moving toward psychotherapy for years, as my interests kept expanding beyond technique and toward a broader understanding of people and their lives. At the same time, I had to accept that the professional identity I had built had run its course.
During this period, I stepped into a leadership role in a multidisciplinary group psychotherapy practice, which I continue to co-lead today. Working closely with therapists across a range of orientations showed me how many different ways there were to understand the same presenting problem.
I earned my M.Ed. in Counseling, with a concentration in Clinical Mental Health, from George Mason University. During my clinical training at George Mason’s Center for Community Mental Health, I worked with clients facing anxiety, depression, PTSD, grief, relationship and attachment concerns, infidelity, body image difficulties, compulsive behaviors, and major life transitions. I also co-led a men’s group on connection, confidence, and purpose.
One thing surprised me. I had assumed I was already working at the finest grain of how change happens. Psychotherapy did not prove me wrong so much as show me how much surrounded what I had been looking at. A pattern that looks like one person’s problem is often shaped and sustained by relationships, family, personal history, health, and the wider culture around them. The map became more complex, but also more accurate.
06
The practice today
Today, I bring that earlier experience into a broader psychotherapeutic framework. My work is informed by existential and humanistic psychotherapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, attachment theory, Gestalt principles, mindfulness, clinical hypnosis, somatic awareness, imagery, and other experiential approaches.
With couples, I draw on Gottman Method Couples Therapy alongside attachment-based approaches, with influences from Emotion-Focused Therapy, Imago Relationship Therapy, and Relational Life Therapy. I also offer Discernment Counseling when partners are uncertain whether they want to begin couples therapy, separate, or continue as they are.
Experiential work remains one of the central ways I practice. It taught me to look for “the difference that makes the difference,” the one piece that lets a whole pattern reorganize. Graduate training taught me to look for that leverage point while also understanding the person’s life, relationships, and history.
I still love the moment when a problem that felt permanent suddenly opens up. I’ve just stopped confusing that moment with the whole story.