Students & Young Adults
Parents
Adult Individuals
Artists & Creatives
Schools
Organizations
“Not the world, not what’s outside of us, but what we hold inside traps us. We may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind with which we create our world.” — Gabor Maté
I currently see individual clients with a range of objectives and needs: young adolescents and young adults with school challenges, academic and/or emotional challenges; parents seeking guidance and insight with regard to their experience; adult individuals in transition or struggling with relationships, addiction, anxiety, depression, or emotional issues; artists and creatives seeking to leverage their work for greater self-understanding or enliven their work through that understanding; and schools and organizations seeking to explore how to best serve their populations through a trauma-informed lens, either proactively or in response to a difficult event, transition, or tragedy.
About my practice.
In addition to this work, which is my great love and deep passion, I am a teacher, mentor, and community partner. I am a working singer-songwriter and guitar player with deep roots in the artistic community and a particular affinity for collaboration. I am deeply dedicated to meditation and have studied and taught in that realm for nearly two decades. I am the proud father of two children, both in college. I grew up in Providence, Rhode Island and have lived in Boston, Nantucket, Santa Barbara, and Bozeman. I currently live in Portland, Oregon and see clients across the United States and overseas.
I come to this work with humility and with deep gratitude for my own transformational journey. I began my professional career at the tender age of twenty-one as a teacher and residence hall director at a boarding high school, and for the next twenty-five years I served as the director of several private schools around the United States and worked closely with students, parents, teachers, and community members. Later in life I began to acknowledge and process the trauma of my childhood and the ways in which I had adapted to those experiences. I also began to observe and explore the ways in which early trauma and disconnection impacts students, families, and professionals as well as the ways in which school and other childhood experiences unwittingly perpetuate that trauma and disconnection.
When I discovered the transformative and trauma-informed Compassionate Inquiry methodology of Dr. Gabor Maté, along with the powerful frameworks of Internal Family Systems and Polyvagal Theory, developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz and Dr. Stephen Porges, respectively, I immediately recognized the work that my early career had prepared me for. I committed to a period of intensive study with Dr. Gabor Mate, and I received formalized training in Internal Family Systems, Polyvagal Theory, and other trauma-informed methodologies. Additionally, I received certification as a Transformational Coach.