With fifteen-years of hospice service and eleven years as psychotherapist, I bring a wealth of academia and experience into the room. I've helped men and women who struggled with a traumatic past, depression, and anxiety. And I've mentored folks who were seeking a deeper, meaningful connection to self and "Other". In recent years, I've created space for unusual phenomena that has long been a part of the human experience across the world in mythic and literal forms. Unfortunately, many credible and functioning individuals have not found a place to explore these strange phenomena and, instead, have found themselves dismissed and even pathologized by traditional psychiatry and the rest of the mental health profession. ​

 

But both the brain and the mind are too complex for simple explanations. Trying to funnel human experiences through narrow ontological and epistemological frameworks, as does mainstream psychiatry and psychology, is risky business and potentially harmful to cultural diversity. Some of the most bizarre but, nevertheless, genuine experiences consist of a reality with immaterial properties long held throughout the world and by various spiritual traditions.

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At some point, the age old discussion on psychosis enters the picture. So what is psychosis? And are symptoms such as hearing voices or seeing the Virgin Mary strictly an internal phenomenon in relation to self, a literal independent experience, or a combination of the two? You can learn more about my position by turning the pages of this website, but in a nutshell psychosis are intense mental and emotional features that surface out of stressful circumstances and events. And sometimes psychosis can coexist alongside of genuine but unusual phenomena. The quest is to decipher when psychosis is part of an independent source and when it is solely an internal experience. Either way, I see psychosis as a passage that, if treated with dignity, can integrate and empower the experiencer.