My Approach

Psychodynamic

Psychodynamic therapy is the foundation of how I work. The central premise is straightforward: much of what drives human behavior operates outside conscious awareness. They are patterns of behavior that were shaped by early experience, and they persist because they remain unexamined.

Where many therapeutic approaches focus on symptom management, psychodynamic work focuses on what produces the symptom. Anxiety, for instance, is rarely the core problem. It is often a signal that something underneath needs attention. These include long-ago repressed feelings and avoided desires. Managing the anxiety can help temporarily, but understanding what generates it can resolve it for good.

In practice, I pay close attention to the things you do that you may not be aware of. How do you relate to others? What happens when someone gets close to you? What do you do when you feel criticized? How do you handle your anger? These questions reveal the architecture of your inner world in ways that a symptom checklist cannot. The answers do not come from me telling you what I think is going on, but from both of us paying careful attention to what emerges in the room.

Relational

My work is relationally oriented, which means that I pay close attention to what happens between people — in your close relationships and in the therapy relationship itself.

How you relate to me often mirrors how you relate to the important people in your life. If you tend to defer to others, you will probably defer to me. If you tend to withdraw when things feel uncomfortable, you will probably do that in session too. If you manage other people's emotions at the expense of your own, that pattern will show up between us. When I notice these dynamics and name them carefully, they become some of useful therapeutic material. The therapy relationship is itself part of the work.

For couples, relational orientation means looking at the dysfunctional patterns that get played out between and with one another. Every couple has a dynamic that both partners maintain, usually without realizing it. One partner pursues, and the other partner withdraws. Or, one partner criticizes, and the other partner shuts down. Or, one partner carries the emotional weight, while the other partner remains emotionally distant. Both partners contribute to the pattern, and both partners have a role in changing it. I am less interested in whose version of the story is more accurate and more interested in the relational system that keeps producing the same painful dynamic.

ISTDP (Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy)

I am currently in advanced training in ISTDP, a highly specific psychodynamic approach developed by Habib Davanloo. ISTDP works directly with the anxiety and defenses that keep difficult emotions out of reach.

The model is built on the simple observation that most psychological suffering is maintained by a triangle of forces. There is an underlying feeling — often grief, anger, guilt, or love — that the person has learned to keep at a distance. There is the anxiety that arises when that feeling starts to surface. And then there are the defenses — the automatic strategies a person uses to keep the feeling from being experienced. These defenses were intelligent adaptations at one point. The problem is that they persist long after they are needed, and they generate much of the suffering people bring to therapy.

ISTDP works to bring awareness to the defenses a person uses so that the underlying feeling can be accessed and processed. This is not an intellectual exercise. It happens in real time, in the body, in the session. The therapist and client work together to bring the defense into awareness, understand what it protects against, and create the conditions for the blocked feeling to surface.

ISTDP tends to move faster than traditional psychodynamic therapy. It is intensive — the name is accurate — and it requires a willingness to be emotionally challenged. If you are interested in a more detailed explanation of how ISTDP works, I have written about it in more depth on the ISTDP page.

RLT (Relational Life Therapy)

I am a certified Relational Life Therapy therapist. RLT was developed by Terry Real, and it takes a fundamentally different position from most couples therapy, recognizing that the site of relational change is individual transformation. The goal is not to teach a couple better communication techniques. It is to help each partner become a more relational human being.

RLT begins with a provocative premise. It understands character not as fixed psychological structure, but as your internalized family — the relational themes and roles that you inherited and adapted to in childhood. Because it is relational in origin, it is changeable in the context of relationship. RLT expects dramatic change, and it expects it faster than most approaches.

The framework identifies what happens when people are triggered in their relationships. Under stress, everyone has a reactive, self-protective part — what RLT calls the Adaptive Child. This part is rigid, black-and-white, and not interested in intimacy. It is interested in self-protection. It was brilliant when you were young and it is the source of most relational destruction when you are an adult. The clinical work is developing the capacity to notice when you have been hijacked by that reactive part and to deliberately step into a more regulated, adult stance in real time.

RLT is more directive than many therapeutic approaches. I do not facilitate neutrally. I name what I see, I take positions, and I challenge both partners on the specific behaviors that create distance in the relationship. I do this while holding both people in genuine positive regard. For me, the two are not in conflict. In RLT, joining someone through honest confrontation is more respectful than colluding with the behaviors that are destroying what they say they want.

What I find most useful about RLT is that it moves couples past the endless cycle of mutual blame toward something actionable. Instead of spending session after session on who did what to whom, the focus shifts to: what are you doing, right now, that contributes to this dynamic?

Buddhist-Informed Perspective

I trained at Naropa University, a graduate program in Boulder, Colorado founded on contemplative principles. My primary clinical influence in this area is the work of Bruce Tift, a psychotherapist who has spent decades integrating Buddhist understanding with Western clinical practice. This shapes how I think about awareness, presence, and what it means to actually change — but it is not a religious framework and does not require any spiritual belief.

Western therapy is largely organized around improvement. It helps us to become better versions of ourselves, function more effectively, and build healthier relationships. These are worthwhile aims, and they make up most of the practical work I do with clients. But the Buddhist-informed perspective holds a larger context alongside those goals: namely, the possibility that freedom comes not from endlessly improving your situation, but from loosening your identification with it.

In practice, this invites us to orient toward direct experience rather than conceptual understanding. Much of what keeps people stuck is maintained by stories, interpretations, and narratives about who they are and why things are the way they are. These stories feel true, and they often contain genuine insight. But they also function as a way of staying in your head and out of your body — out of the immediate, felt experience of what is actually happening right now. When I invite a client to stay with a feeling rather than explain it, to notice what is happening in their body rather than analyze what it means, that is the Buddhist-informed perspective at work.

This also shapes how I think about the role of the therapist. I do not see myself primarily as a change agent. My investment in the process is less about engineering a particular outcome and more about consistently reflecting back an invitation to be more aware of whatever is most true in your experience and behavior at the moment. Sometimes that awareness itself is what produces the shift. Sometimes it reveals what still needs to be faced. Either way, the quality of attention matters as much as the technique.

PACT (Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy)

I am trained to Level 2 in PACT, developed by Stan Tatkin. PACT integrates attachment theory, neuroscience, and arousal regulation to help couples understand what happens to each partner's nervous system under stress.

The core insight of PACT is that relationship conflict is a nervous system problem. When one partner feels threatened (by things like distance, criticism, and perceived abandonment) their nervous system activates in ways that are automatic and fast. The other partner's nervous system responds in kind. Within seconds, both people are in a reactive state, and no communication technique in the world will help until the nervous system has settled.

PACT pays close attention to moment-to-moment interactions in the session such as tone of voice, facial expression, body posture, and eye contact. These micro-signals reveal the attachment system in action more accurately than what people say about their relationship in retrospect. The work is learning to recognize your own nervous system activation, understand your partner's, and build enough safety between you that both systems can regulate.

I draw on PACT's understanding of attachment and the nervous system in my couples work, though my primary couples framework is RLT. The PACT lens is most useful for helping partners understand why they react the way they do, and for building the kind of felt safety that makes deeper relational work possible.