The therapist
behind the work.

I spent ten years in management trying to climb the corporate ladder before I found my way here. Hell-bent on achieving, holding everything together for everyone around me, sacrificing my health and sanity to make it happen. From the outside it probably looked like success. From the inside it was survival mode dressed up as ambition.

I was running on fumes and resentment, and somewhere along the way lost track of myself entirely. On a road trip one day I heard something about the difference between surviving and thriving. It landed differently than I expected. I'd been climbing the whole time but destroying myself doing it. I didn't know how I'd do it, but I knew I had to get out.

Leaving wasn't clean. Panic attacks. Guilt that I was letting everyone down. Overworking to make sure I left things right, and when I couldn't get it all done, hiding the loose ends to not face the shame of others' disappointment in me. That experience, the anxiety, the shame, the impossibility of ever feeling like enough, showed up in a big way as I left my career, but the patterns that caused me problems ran deep and connected to damn near every area of my life. That realization is part of why I do this work today.

The transition to counseling wasn't random. I'd always loved the development side of management, helping people understand themselves, unlock potential, grow. But I kept hitting a ceiling. The depth I was hungry for wasn't available there. And I'd had such a transformative experience in my own therapy, work that helped me realize I had value outside of my work identity, that it clicked. This is what I felt called to do.

I've been in therapy myself for the better part of ten years. What that work gave me wasn't simply a set of insights or a list of things to change. It was a relationship. A steady, consistent, secure presence through everything that gave me the space to awaken to my own patterns and come to freer choice in navigating my life. My therapist never told me what to do. He didn't have to. I pieced it together little by little, in my own time, in a relationship that held me through all of it. That experience is why I believe in this process the way I do. Not only because the research says it works. Because I've lived it myself, in the room, on the couch week after week.

Imposter syndrome followed me into this field too, at first. I found myself trying to be the therapist I thought everyone needed me to be, bending my approach to fit, falling into the same patterns I'd spent years trying to understand. Then something shifted. I realized I could just be myself and trust that the right clients would find me. That the relationship can only work when it's real. Any clinical expertise I bring is always going to be secondary to that. So I stopped performing and started showing up. The right fits got better. The wrong fits found someone better suited. Win-win.