On this page, you can find information about the professional education and training I have done and continue to do. The ongoing development this work requires has always been one of the most satisfying parts. But credentials are only part of the picture — they're not the only thing that determines who I am as a therapist. All the life I've lived, before and since entering this field, has shaped who I am as a therapist.

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Therapy works because it takes place between two human beings, each with real experiences, inner worlds, and textured personalities. When we sit with a new therapist, we usually aren't thinking about where they studied or how many certifications they have. We want to feel like they're a real human being too, and that we might be able to open up and approach difficult work with them. We can feel all this without knowing all the details about them.

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My path to this field has included many experiences that weren't obviously connected to clinical psychology or therapy. But looking back, a common theme kept surfacing, no matter what I was doing. This story illustrates it well.

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When I was in my late 20s, living in New York City, a friend and I decided to write and develop a 2-person theater piece to perform at Le Petit Versailles (a community garden on the Lower East Side, established by artists who wanted to create a queer public space in the city). Brainstorming together, we focused on the idea that a person needs a witness to their experience to integrate the meaning of that experience. We wound up with a performance that was as silly as it was solemn. We played mad scientists who enlisted our audiences to join us in bearing witness to a handful of stories that were unwitnessed and, in some sense, unfinished. We called this the Exquisite Witness, thinking about the Surrealist-inspired drawing game "Exquisite Corpse", where each person adds to a drawing without seeing the whole. No single participant controls the creation, so the result combines many imaginations into something none of them could have planned.

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Now, years later, I think about how being witness to another person's life-- their suffering, confusion, joy, and growth-- is a large part of the work I do. That work is also collaborative and emergent, like the drawing game the piece was named for. You and I both take part in what unfolds. You may come in with a goal or direction, but the process itself takes shape between us, in ways neither of us could fully plan on our own.