Yalom, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, Philosophy of Psychedelics
Depth-oriented, trauma-informed, and grounded in lived experience Therapy is not about fixing you. It's about reconnecting you with what's already alive inside you.
In-person sessions on Capitol Hill are especially powerful for the embodied, relational aspects of this work.
"The body is our general medium for having a world."
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty
We slow down. Way down.
There's space for the thing you can't name yet. For the moment when your voice changes and neither of us pretends it didn't happen. For the silence that isn't empty.
You don't have to arrive with insight. You don't have to be articulate about your pain. We find it together—in your body, in the moment, in the space between us.
This isn't therapy that stays in your head. We track what's happening in your body as you're talking—the shift in your breathing, the way your eyes go distant, the moment your voice flattens, the impulse to change the subject right when something important surfaces.
Those aren't distractions from therapy. They're the therapy. That's where trauma lives, and that's where it heals.
Understanding yourself from the inside instead of analyzing yourself from the outside.
Emotions that flow instead of flood or freeze. A body that feels like yours. Relationships where you can stay present through difficulty.
Access to parts of yourself that had to go offline years ago. Choices you couldn't see before because survival was taking all the bandwidth.
This isn't symptom management. It's coming home to yourself.
Trauma doesn't resolve through insight alone.
It lives in:
I usually start with whatever lets your system feel safest—sometimes that's just talking, sometimes it's Brainspotting, sometimes it's a low-dose ketamine session so things don't feel so sharp. We'll figure out together what your nervous system needs.
The modalities I draw from include:
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) — A structured, evidence-based trauma therapy that helps release the emotional and somatic charge of overwhelming memories. It allows you to integrate the past rather than keep reliving it. Learn more about EMDR →
Brainspotting — A deeper-access modality for trauma stored beneath words. It can unlock emotional states that feel frozen, unreachable, or "offline," especially for clients who tend to shut down or feel numb.
Flash Technique — A gentle, low-distress method used when trauma feels too overwhelming to approach directly. Flash reduces emotional intensity without flooding or retraumatization. Especially helpful for clients who fear being overwhelmed.
Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) — Offered in collaboration with Journey Clinical. When appropriate, KAP can help soften defenses and increase emotional access, especially for clients struggling with depression, numbness, shutdown, or long-standing trauma patterns. I provide: preparation, dosing support, integration sessions. I do not prescribe or dispense ketamine. All medical services are handled by a prescriber.
I also offer psychedelic integration therapy for clients who've had experiences with other substances and need support making sense of what surfaced.
Relational Trauma Work — We work moment-by-moment with shame, fear, emotional avoidance, attachment injuries, unmet developmental needs, and parts of you that disconnect to stay safe. Your internal world often learned to protect itself in isolation. In therapy, those patterns finally have a place to be seen and reorganized through connection.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) — For clients who benefit from explicit work with values, psychological flexibility, and reducing the grip of avoidance patterns. ACT helps you move toward what matters even when difficult thoughts and feelings show up.
This is the core of my work.
Existential and phenomenological therapy focus on:
Instead of trying to correct your symptoms from the outside, we turn toward:
This isn't pathologizing. It's clarifying. It helps you understand yourself in a way that makes change possible—not forced.
I'm sometimes asked how this differs from psychoanalysis.
While I respect psychoanalytic traditions, I don't locate most human experience in a hidden unconscious requiring years of interpretation.
What feels "unconscious" is usually pre-reflective—already alive in your body, emotions, and relational patterns right now. We bring gentle attention to what's showing itself in the present moment. When paired with nervous-system tools (EMDR, Brainspotting, somatic pacing), stuck material can soften surprisingly quickly—often in months rather than years.
This feels less mysterious, less intellectual, and more immediately relieving for adults who've already spent years "understanding" their past without much bodily or emotional shift.
Your experiences don't exist in isolation. They are shaped by:
My background in information architecture and phenomenology uniquely shapes how I track and integrate these layers.
I hold:
Many clients tell me: "You connect dots I didn't know were connected."
That's because I'm tracking the whole of your experience—not just the symptom in front of us.
Traditional talk therapy focuses on insight and understanding. This work integrates that with body-based processing through EMDR, Brainspotting, and somatic awareness. You're not just talking about trauma—you're processing how it lives in your nervous system.
It varies. Some clients feel significant shifts in 3-6 months. Others work for a year or more, especially with complex trauma. The depth-oriented approach often creates lasting change more efficiently than years of traditional therapy.
Yes. EMDR, Brainspotting, and KAP all have strong research support for trauma treatment. The existential-phenomenological framework provides the philosophical grounding that integrates these methods into coherent, meaningful work.