How I Work

You've done the work of understanding. You can trace the anxiety back, explain the withdrawal, recognize the pattern while it's happening.

And you still do it.

That's not a personal failing. The beliefs driving your behaviour aren't stored in conscious thought — they're encoded in emotional memory and the nervous system, systems that don't update through insight. Most therapy talks to the part of your brain that already gets it.

We don't recap your week. We work with what's live.

Say a belief surfaces: if I show vulnerability, I'll be rejected. We don't debate it. We activate it, then bring it into contact with lived experience that contradicts it — a moment, in the room, where vulnerability produced connection instead. When your brain registers that contradiction emotionally, the belief can rewrite. That's memory reconsolidation, and it's the engine of this work.

Or anxiety rises while you're talking. Instead of noting it and moving on, we stay. Where is it in your body? What is it protecting? What happens if you don't push it away?

Or I watch you do the thing — deflect, intellectualize, go somewhere else. I'll name it — that moment, live, is usually the most useful thing in the session.

This is efficient. Working directly with the nervous system tends to move faster than circling an issue intellectually for months. Sessions are active, sometimes intense. I'm here to help you change, not to make the hour pleasant.

There's a gap between what you know and what you feel to be true. That gap is anatomy, not weakness.

Conscious understanding runs on the prefrontal cortex and explicit memory. The learnings that drive your behaviour run on subcortical structures, implicit memory, the autonomic nervous system. Different systems, different update rules.

This is why you can know you're safe while your heart races. Know you're competent while feeling like a fraud. The knowledge and the feeling are stored in different places, and the deeper one doesn't read the memos.

It updates one way: a felt experience that contradicts the original learning while it's active. Memory reconsolidation. Inside that window, the brain doesn't suppress the old learning — it rewrites it.

You won't just think differently about yourself. The old response stops arriving.

Direct, fairly challenging, more humor than you'd expect. Warmth, but not softness — I care about your growth more than your comfort, though I attend to both.

A number of my clients are executives, founders, physicians, and other therapists — people who are quick, articulate, and very good at staying one move ahead of their own feelings. That skill doesn't work on me, which is usually why they stay.

If you want someone who mostly listens and validates, I'm the wrong fit. If you want someone who'll go to depth with you and tell you the truth on the way, we'll work well together.