Clinical Focus & Work
What happens when an experience is correctly identified but incorrectly explained?
Anxiety is real. Depression is real. So are difficulties with attention, emotional regulation, relationships, or feeling at home in your own life. But identifying what someone is experiencing doesn't necessarily tell us why it is happening.
My clinical work begins with curiosity about what may be happening underneath—or alongside—the experiences that bring someone to therapy. I’m interested in how trauma, neurodivergence, identity, relationships, sexuality, environment, and the ways we’ve learned to protect ourselves can interact.
I approach that process somewhat like hypothesis testing. We develop an understanding of what may be happening, look at the evidence, try things, pay attention to what changes, and remain willing to revise our understanding.
I’m also interested in what may be happening at multiple levels—from psychological and relational processes to what we understand about attention, reward, stress, and neurochemistry. When medication is part of the picture, I’m interested in what someone’s response may help us understand and how medication and psychotherapy can work alongside one another.
Understanding what is happening is critical. Understanding why can change what we do about it.
Complex Trauma & Queer Identity
Trauma is not always one terrible thing that happened. Sometimes it develops through experiences that were repeated, relational, or difficult to escape: instability, neglect, shame, rejection, having to monitor other people's emotions, or learning that some parts of yourself were unacceptable to others and some were safer to show.
At its core, we can think about trauma as the ways our minds and nervous systems learn to automatically protect us when we don't yet have the tools, support, or safety we need to understand and move through painful experiences. Those adaptations can remain with us long after the circumstances that created them have changed.
For queer people, our histories can be particularly complicated. Many of us grow up monitoring how we move, speak, connect, disclose, or express desire. We may learn which parts of us are welcome and which might put belonging at risk—even without an obvious experience of violence or rejection.
I come to this work as a genderqueer, polyamorous gay man, and this understanding of trauma is personal for me as well as clinical. Part of my own work has involved becoming curious about how I learned to protect myself, what those responses made possible at the time, and whether I still need them now. I don't think of that process as something I completed before becoming a therapist. I continue to learn about myself.
I try to understand these adaptations for what they often were: intelligent responses to the environments in which they developed. Therapy can help us understand what they are doing now, process what still needs processing, and create more room for safety, connection, choice, and flexibility.
ADHD, Executive Function & Emotional Regulation
ADHD is often described as a problem with attention. That is part of it, but it can be a remarkably incomplete description of what living with ADHD actually feels like.
I think about ADHD more broadly in terms of executive function: how we initiate and sustain action, shift attention, hold information in mind, organize across time, regulate emotion, and access what we know when we need it. Someone can understand exactly what they need to do and still have enormous difficulty reliably doing it.
I am particularly interested in the systems underneath that gap. Attention, motivation, reward, emotional regulation, and executive function are connected to underlying neurobiology, including dopamine and other neurotransmitter systems. Understanding those mechanisms can move us away from explanations based on laziness or willpower and toward curiosity about what actually helps a particular brain engage.
I have ADHD myself, and my understanding of my own mind continues to evolve. I remain curious about how my brain shapes my experience and continue experimenting with tools, structures, and ways of understanding myself that help all the different parts of me work together more effectively. I bring that same curiosity into therapy: not assuming something should work because it works for someone else, but paying attention to what actually happens when we try it.
Years of struggling with executive function can also accumulate into an emotional history of anxiety, shame, avoidance, perfectionism, or feeling that something is wrong with us. The work is therefore both practical and emotional: understanding the brain we have, learning how to work with it, and examining what we've learned to believe about ourselves along the way.
Sex, Relationships & Relationship Diversity
Sex rarely exists in a vacuum. It can be tangled up with identity, shame, desire, attachment, trauma, relationships, gender, body image, culture, and the messages we've absorbed about what we're supposed to want—or who we're supposed to be.
In sex therapy, I want us to be able to talk about what is actually happening. That might mean desire that has changed or disappeared, differences in sex drive between partners, difficulty staying present during sex, performance anxiety, sexual pain or avoidance, fantasies that bring up complicated feelings, or trying to understand what sex means to you in the first place.
For queer people, sexuality and identity work are often difficult to separate. Coming out doesn't necessarily finish the work of figuring out who we are. We may still be sorting through gender, desire, bodies, roles, relationship structures, internalized expectations, or the ways we learned to make ourselves more acceptable to other people. Therapy can give us somewhere to examine those questions without assuming there is a particular answer we're supposed to arrive at.
I'm comfortable being specific. There are very few things you can tell me about sex, sexuality, or relationships that are going to make me particularly alarmed. Usually, I'm going to get curious.
Creatives & Performers
Creative work asks a lot of us. It can be deeply meaningful while also bringing us into unusually close contact with rejection, uncertainty, comparison, perfectionism, visibility, financial instability, and the uncomfortable experience of having something personally meaningful evaluated by other people.
I know that world from inside it. I trained as an actor, and performance, singing, dance, and other creative work continue to be part of my life. I understand the strange overlap between this is what I do and this is who I am that can make creative careers particularly complicated.
Therapy with creatives and performers may involve anxiety, attention and executive function, identity, relationships, burnout, performance concerns, career transitions, or questions that have very little to do with the creative work itself. You don't have to translate the culture of the room before we can get to what brought you there.
For work specifically focused on acting, performance, or career development rather than mental health treatment, I also offer coaching through Continuum Coaching →
Looking Upstream
People come to therapy with very different histories of understanding themselves. Some are just beginning. Others have years of therapy, diagnoses, medication trials, and coping skills behind them—and may have gotten real relief while still feeling that something remains unresolved.
Anxiety and depression can accurately describe what someone is experiencing without necessarily explaining why it is happening. Sometimes what we experience most clearly may be happening downstream from something we haven't fully understood or addressed.
I have seen anxiety and depressive experiences change substantially as underlying trauma is processed, something also reflected in trauma-treatment research. I am increasingly asking similar questions about ADHD: what changes when executive function, activation, reward, and emotional regulation are better understood and supported?
I don't assume the answer. Anxiety and mood disorders can exist independently or interact with trauma, ADHD, and other experiences in complicated ways. I treat these possibilities as hypotheses—paying attention to history, research, and what actually changes with treatment.
Something that hasn't changed yet may still be capable of changing.
How I Work
Therapy with me is active, collaborative, and relational. I listen closely, ask a lot of questions, and offer my perspective. I don't believe a therapist needs to have all the answers, but I also don't think you should have to wonder what your therapist is thinking.
My work is integrative, which means I don't expect one therapeutic approach to fit every person or every problem. Depending on what we're working on, I may draw from cognitive and behavioral therapies, ACT, DBT, parts-informed work, trauma-focused approaches, attachment and relational work, mindfulness, motivational interviewing, executive-function strategies, and experiential methods.
Sometimes the work is practical: learning a skill, changing a behavior, building structure, or experimenting with a different response. Sometimes we need to understand a pattern more deeply. Sometimes there is an experience that needs to be processed rather than continually managed. Often we're doing more than one of those things at once.
I bring warmth, directness, curiosity, and humor into the room. I also want therapy to remain responsive. We can have a strong idea about what might help and discover that it doesn't. That's useful information. We pay attention, adjust, and keep going.
Over time, I hope therapy becomes a place where you understand yourself more clearly, have more ways to respond to what happens inside and around you, and need less effort simply to keep yourself functioning.
Learn more about the approaches I use →
Work With Me
If something here feels familiar—or has made you curious about whether I might understand your experience differently—we can start with a consultation.
I work with adults, couples, and those in ethically non-monogamous relationships and am currently accepting new clients.