How I Work

Depth when depth is called for, practical tools when they help. In my Durham, NC practice—and online across North Carolina—I integrate several therapeutic approaches in my work with individuals and couples. Rather than fitting clients to a single model, I shape the work around the needs, history, and particularity of each person or couple.

You do not need to know which approach is right for you. We can begin with what is happening, what you hope to understand or change, and shape the work together.

Psychoanalytic and Relational Psychotherapy

Psychoanalytic and relational psychotherapy is a collaborative exploration of the wishes, fears, memories, conflicts, and ways of relating that shape our lives, including those outside immediate awareness. Patterns and symptoms often began as resourceful attempts to protect connection, preserve safety, manage overwhelming experience, or negotiate conflicting wishes. A symptom can cause real suffering while also doing something important—holding a conflict at bay, preserving an attachment, or giving form to something that could not yet be thought or said. Understanding both its costs and its uses can create more choice.

In sessions, we might slow down a recent interaction, follow an unexpected feeling, notice what becomes difficult to say, connect a present dilemma with an earlier relationship, or become curious about what is taking shape between us. We may ask what a symptom protects, permits, or prevents, and explore desire: what you want, what you fear wanting, what you have learned to want, and what remains difficult to imagine. Meaning develops through conversation and association, remains open to revision, and stays grounded in the actual relationships and decisions that bring you to therapy.

At its heart, this work is also about love: our longing to know and be known; the ways love becomes entangled with fear, anger, dependence, shame, and loss; and our capacity to care for others while staying connected to ourselves. I approach each person with curiosity and honesty, respecting the dignity, complexity, and mystery of each life. As experiences find language and conflicting parts of the self become more bearable, greater freedom can emerge in how you relate, choose, and live.

Jungian and Depth-Oriented Psychotherapy

Jungian and depth-oriented psychotherapy begins with the understanding that conscious awareness is only one part of psychic life. Dreams, images, fantasies, recurring themes, and unexpectedly strong feelings can bring us into contact with experiences that have not yet found ordinary language. They may reveal neglected conflicts, values, longings, sources of vitality, or possibilities that have not yet been lived. Their meaning is personal and contextual, shaped by your history, relationships, culture, beliefs, and sources of meaning.

In sessions, we might linger with a dream, image, phrase, or recurring scene; follow the associations it evokes; notice the feelings and bodily responses that accompany it; and consider how it resonates with your present life. We may attend to what feels strangely compelling, what has become flat or lifeless, and what seems to be asking for expression. Interpretations remain provisional and develop through our conversation, allowing an image or experience to gather meaning over time.

This approach can be especially useful during life transitions, creative impasses, spiritual or existential questioning, or periods when life feels constricted, fragmented, or drained of meaning. Wholeness here means becoming more able to include contradiction, relate to unfamiliar parts of oneself, and make room for possibilities that conscious plans may overlook. The hope is a life with greater imagination, freedom, and aliveness—one that feels increasingly your own.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

Cognitive behavioral therapy offers practical ways to explore how thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, and actions influence one another. These elements can form self-reinforcing loops. For example, a feared interpretation may increase bodily alarm; that alarm can make danger feel more certain; and avoidance may bring short-term relief while narrowing life over time. Mapping a loop can help us find places where even a small change might alter what happens next.

In sessions, we might slow down a recent situation and trace what you noticed, thought, felt in your body, and did. We might consider another interpretation, practice a different response, or design a manageable experiment and see what actually happens. Interpretations become hypotheses to explore, and everyday experience provides information. Strategies are adjusted according to what proves useful for you.

I draw on CBT when structure, skills, or experimentation may help loosen a stuck pattern. Practical change and deeper understanding can inform each other, so we remain attentive to how a pattern developed, the function it may serve, and what changing it might make possible. The aim is greater flexibility, a wider range of choices, and tools that fit the person using them.

Mindfulness and Meditation

Mindfulness is the practice of meeting present experience with attention, curiosity, and less judgment. Thoughts are mental events: they can carry important information without always being literal facts or instructions. Rumination about the past and anxious rehearsal of the future can intensify distress. Mindfulness helps us recognize when attention has been captured by these loops and reconnect with what is happening now.

Meditation is one way of strengthening this capacity. The mind will wander; noticing that movement and gently returning attention is the practice itself. In sessions, we might use a brief breathing or sensory exercise, notice how an emotion is felt in the body, observe a thought without immediately following it, or develop a grounding practice that fits you. Practices can be brief, active, or still and are adapted to what feels useful and manageable.

I use mindfulness and meditation to help clients develop a steadier relationship with difficult thoughts and feelings, create more space between impulse and action, and respond with greater intention. This kind of attention can support both practical regulation and deeper inquiry: when an experience becomes easier to stay with, there is often more room to understand what it carries.

Narrative Therapy

Narrative therapy begins with the recognition that we make meaning through stories and are also shaped by stories we did not choose. Personal and family histories, cultural expectations, social identities, and systems of power influence what we notice, remember, expect, and imagine possible. A story can hold important truth and still leave parts of a life unseen. Narrative therapy creates room to examine how a problem has come to organize experience, what supports its influence, and which aspects of you it has pushed to the margins.

In sessions, we might trace when a problem gained influence, identify the situations and relationships that strengthen or weaken it, and examine the language, expectations, or judgments through which it operates. We also listen for moments that complicate the dominant story: times you acted from care, courage, resistance, humor, loyalty, or desire, even if those moments seemed small. These details often reveal values and capacities that the story organized around the problem has overlooked.

The aim is a fuller and more complex account of your life—one that honors what has happened, takes suffering and social realities seriously, and gives greater presence to the relationships, commitments, abilities, and possibilities that matter to you. As the story becomes more spacious, new choices can become imaginable and a stronger sense of agency and authorship can emerge.

Couples Therapy

Couples therapy attends to both the immediate problem and the relationship beneath it. It focuses on the patterns partners create together: how each person reaches for connection, protects against hurt, responds to difference, and interprets the other’s intentions. The visible conflict may concern money, sex, parenting, fidelity, family, or daily responsibilities. Beneath it are often questions of trust, recognition, fairness, dependence, and whether it feels safe to need one another. Understanding the argument beneath the argument can make familiar conflicts less automatic and more open to change.

In sessions, we might slow down a recent conflict and trace it moment by moment: what each partner noticed, assumed, felt, said, and did; how the other’s response changed the meaning of the exchange; and where the cycle might have taken a different turn. We may practice saying something difficult in a form the other can hear, notice attempts at repair, or become curious about the fears, needs, and longings carried by criticism, pursuit, silence, or withdrawal. I work to hold both partners’ perspectives while remaining attentive to power, accountability, and the different consequences each person may bear.

Depending on what a couple needs, I may draw on psychoanalytic and relational perspectives, Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, the Gottman Method, Imago Therapy, or discernment counseling. The work may involve interrupting escalation, rebuilding trust after injury or infidelity, restoring intimacy, navigating a transition, or deciding what future is possible. The aim is to help partners speak more honestly, listen with greater openness, repair harm, and choose more deliberately what kind of relationship they want to create. Learn more about my work in couples therapy and marriage counseling, or with LGBTQ couples.