Why I Do This.

I came to this work the way most people do, not through a textbook. The last thing anyone needs when they're trying to figure themselves out is someone telling them to think positive, mistake activity for depth, or worse, someone who takes themselves so seriously they've forgotten what it actually feels like to be a person.

This work lends itself to a lot of self-importance. I try hard not to do that. I've been in therapy my entire career. Before it, actually. And I will be for the rest of my life because I'm a work in progress, and I think that's the point.

I think of the therapy room as a field. We're two people in it together. The space is yours, and I'm in it with you. What happens between us in the room tends to reflect what happens everywhere else. That's the work.

Psychodynamic and psychoanalytic work sometimes gets a bad rap for being all about the past, for digging up old wounds and laying blame at the feet of your childhood. That's not what this is. The past matters, but only because it shows up here, now, in the patterns you're living today. This work is alive. It moves.

I'm drawn to Thomas Ogden's idea that something is created in the space between therapist and patient that belongs to neither of us alone. We work with what's alive right now, and let that open everything else up.

Psychotherapy: a place where the mind is formed.

"It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self."

— D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality

Who I Work With

My patients are creative professionals: writers, designers, photographers, painters, musicians, architects, marketers, and entrepreneurs. People who live at the intersection of art and ambition.

Some are in Wicker Park and Bucktown, making work they believe in and wondering if wanting more makes them ungrateful or just awake. Some are in River North and the West Loop, running studios and leading teams, quietly aware that success doesn't feel the way they thought it would. Most of them are women or LGBTQ+.

What they have in common isn't a diagnosis. It's a particular kind of inner life. They feel things deeply. They notice things other people miss. They're very good at what they do, and still find themselves stuck in patterns they can't quite name. Good at their lives on paper, and quietly aware that something is missing.

Some have never been to therapy before. Some have tried it, found it too surface-level, and want something that actually goes somewhere. Some are in the middle of a career transition and realizing it's also something else: a question about identity, desire, or what kind of life they actually want.

If any of that sounds familiar, you're probably my kind of person.