Working With Me
While I’m a professional with over 30 years of clinical experience as a therapist, I am not interested or willing to hide behind some veneer of professionalism. Personally and professionally my unabashedly broken open-heart serves as a beacon and model for others attracting men and women who are interested and in desperate need of a fully embodied life.
I have been cracked open only to realize that I am whole inside and I’m teaching others to do the same.
I invite you to sit with me courageously at the alchemical fires of purification and change. I invite you to unearth your pain and the places you got hurt, where you defended against your sensitivity, and where the wounds were left in their place. Let us identify and untangle your defenses and coping strategies, set down the distractions and addictions, and acknowledge and grow your emotional awareness, enhance your gifts, and develop genuine self care.
These tools can dramatically improve your relationship with Self, others, and your work. And help you to withstand the inevitable challenges and triumphs of life. In this quest I have witnessed men and women find their tears and hurt, anger and terror, hopelessness and despair. However, on the same path they have reclaimed their joy and lightness of being. Buoyed by emotional awareness, tenderness and compassion for the selves and others.
Relationships
With Self, with career, and with an intimate partner. Each confronts us in its own way. Partnership does so in a particularly challenging fashion. Once the projections, fantasy, and intensity of the honeymoon stage fades, we have the chance to glimpse the exquisite unconscious reasons that we have manifested this relationship at this time.
Clearly intimate partnership is not meant to be conflict free nor led by ongoing romance. Try sharing a bathroom with a lover! Yet we are compelled to partner, to form deep and intimate attachments with obligations and contracts. Relationship is a powerful vehicle in the frontier of self-discovery and growth; to boldly go where we must if we are going to reclaim the lost parts of ourselves or confront the unhealed family legacy we have unwittingly inherited.
Every relationship holds a gift even if the gift is to learn how to walk away. Ultimately each of us is meant to feel our life completely. Relationship is a primary means of breaking the heart open so that we may live with an open heart. We get hurt in relationship and it is in relationship that we heal.
Young Adults
Young adulthood signifies the perfect storm of emotional and hormonal overload. Teens today, as always, face increasing pressures from within and without. They carry the burden of academic, familial and societal expectations along with having to navigate the often unjust and cruel social-dynamics of friendship and peer relations. These days, much of this gets played out in the not-so alternative universe of social media which ultimately governs, colors and impacts their emotional well-being and mental health. This is where they discover and are made to confront a distorted version of social currency that defines their values and sense of self-worth.
This all occurs at the beginning of an intense study of the Self while they and the world around them ripen into something at once momentous and daunting yet complex and mysterious. This is right about the time when our young people are feeling the marvelous illusions of youth begin to fade. They begin to realize that there is labor and sacrifice necessary in the world. That the food on their table and the roof over their head comes with both hard work and oftentimes even harder choices.
During this period most kids are also simultaneously experiencing overwhelming body sensations, intoxicated by life’s possibilities and promise, while meeting desire and inevitable heartbreak for the first time. Frequently they can become paralyzed by confusion, fear and lethargy while possessing the bleakest vision of their potential for a life in a world that appears to be doomed by soul-crushing monotony. All of this is going on while the peddlers of dangerous and even deadly distractions actively and constantly market products, lifestyles and ideas to them in the most insidious and aggressive ways imaginable.
The young adults that I’ve worked with are all searching for both something to stand for and a way to stand out as well as figuring out how to fit in without losing who they are meant to become. Our teenagers are hungry for reliable companions to their anger, intensity, curiosity and passion as they are being introduced to all of life’s poetry.
Our role as the responsible adult(s) in their lives is to be trustworthy guides to their internal experience in order to invite and develop their unique gifts and genius. We’re here to share our experience and wisdom. The success, richness, depth and future of our culture depend upon it. I am a mentor and as such I am unwilling to flinch in the face of the enormity of this sacred task.
Addiction
Alcohol drugs and marijuana are not the enemies. No more so than food, sex, gaming or money. Yet for so many of us they become the vehicles of emotional avoidance and grow to destroy the matter and meaning in our lives. This is the essence of the prison of addiction. The Latin word “addictus” means “enslavement” and in the most important ways it is what often defines our relationship to cigarettes, cocaine, alcohol, opiates and/or any of the other myriad forms of “medications” available to all of us. If we use these substances as coping mechanisms to mask our true feelings, then we never learn what we truly need and we become enslaved by the substance and thus never attune to our wounded Self.
The amount of energy required to live the cycle of addiction is enormous. It allows us to hold our breath against how we actually feel. This makes it possible to shame our sensitivity and to ignore how hard we’re working to hold it all “together”. Alternatively, the effort required to live consciously and spontaneously is usually far less but wholly unknown to us at the same time. It asks of us to know how we feel from moment to moment. Addiction therapy will help to develop the tools to breathe into the dark scary corners of life and to reclaim the lost parts of self and gain mastery of the depth of emotion needed in becoming whole.
Men’s Groups
Men have very little, if any, modeling or support for honest, compassionate emotional guidance and confrontation. Often in relationship we lead with our logic mind, focus on “the problem,” and move “to fix.” We seldom, if ever, attend to the needs or wisdom of the emotional body. Then we find ourselves numb to our own feelings and needs and struggle to find deep companionship, intimac and vulnerability. Friendships are largely experienced based, often centered around activities, drug use, and surface connection and conversation. The result is a deep isolation and loneliness beneath a veneer of busyness and chatter. The medicine is safe exploration and processing of the feelings and needs of the true self in the presence of others invested in this quest. This is my wheel-house.
I have facilitated and been part of men’s groups for over 15 years. There is no healing quite like it. To know beyond a shadow of a doubt that regardless of your story, your shame, and your overwhelm you are not alone prepares the Self for healing and growing in a profound way.