A Second Career, Deliberately Chosen

 

I came to psychotherapy after twenty years in information technology. I spent those years working in technical fields that rewarded precision, structured problem-solving, and the ability to see how complex systems behave. Useful training, as it turned out, for clinical work — though that connection wasn’t obvious to me at the time.

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In my mid-thirties I returned to graduate school at Boston University and earned a Master of Social Work, followed immediately by a post-graduate certificate in the assessment and treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. That trauma specialization has been the center of my clinical practice ever since.

 

The IT background still shapes how I work. I tend to look for the underlying structure of what a client is bringing — the system that produced the symptom, the pattern that produced the moment. Trauma work, when it goes well, requires both technical skill and human presence: the protocols and the timing and the safety frame on one side, the relationship and the attunement and the willingness to be with what surfaces on the other. The two halves of my career have, in a strange way, prepared me for both.

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Style and Approach

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My style is relaxed, curious, and non-judgmental. I’m not a blank-slate therapist. I believe in the therapeutic use of self — meaning that who I am as a clinician shows up in the room, with appropriate boundaries that protect both of us — because I think the relationship is where most of the real work happens. Some material moves through technique. Most of the deeper material moves through being known by another person.

 

I’m direct without being harsh. If I think the work isn’t moving, I’ll say so. If I think a different format or a different clinician would serve you better, I’ll say that too. The therapy-veteran clients I work with often arrive having been told what they wanted to hear by previous providers; what tends to help them more is hearing what’s actually true.

 

I’m careful not to overpromise outcomes. Therapy is real work, and the people who benefit most are those who treat it as such. What I can offer is full attention, clinical competence built over twenty-five years, and honesty about what I see.

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The People I See

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I work with adults — both early in their adult lives and well into them — across a range of identities, backgrounds, and presenting concerns. Many of my clients are gay men, and I have particular experience with the attachment patterns, late coming-out experiences, and relational dynamics that develop when identity has been shaped by family, religious, or cultural environments that did not make room for it. I also work with straight, non-binary, and other LGBTQ+ clients.

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What my clients tend to share, more than any single identity, is the kind of work they are ready to do: patient, sustained, often demanding work on material that has not moved through what they’ve tried before. The trauma history may differ. The willingness to work, when it’s there, tends to look the same.

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Group Therapy Background, and What’s Next
 

A substantial part of my professional formation has been in group therapy. I trained in group psychotherapy through the Northeast Society of Group Psychotherapists (NSGP) beginning in 2011, served on the NSGP board from 2016 to 2025, and served as President of the organization from 2022 to 2024. I taught group theory as an adjunct at Boston University School of Medicine in 2017 and led process groups at BUSM from 2018 to 2022.

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My current client-facing practice is focused on the individual work and three formats described above. The group therapy training, though, is foundational to how I think about clinical work in general — and it’s directly relevant to a developing direction in my practice. In collaboration with another clinician, I am beginning to offer KAP experientials for other clinicians who are interested in this work, with the possibility of extending similar experiential formats to therapy clients over time. More about that direction will appear here as it develops.​​​​