How I Work

Separation and divorce produce a particular kind of grief, and most people going through it are unprepared for how disorienting it is.

Part of what makes it disorienting is that almost no one treats it as grief. When someone dies, there's a funeral. People bring food. There's a shared script, however imperfect, for what you're supposed to feel and for roughly how long. When a marriage ends, none of that exists. Friends take sides, or get uncomfortable and go quiet. You're congratulated on your fresh start. And if you were the one who decided to leave, many people treat that as forfeiting your right to mourn at all.

Clinicians call this disenfranchised grief: real loss that isn't socially recognized as loss, so it has nowhere to go. It doesn't resolve on its own. It goes underground and comes out sideways — as irritability, as a fog you can't think through, as a strange flatness in the middle of something that's supposed to be a relief.

It's also grief that resists being talked about. Ask most people what they've lost and they'll produce a competent summary: the house, the routines, the version of the future they'd assumed. All true, and none of it touches the thing that actually aches. That gap between the accurate account and the unreached feeling is exactly what the felt sense is for.

So we go slower than the summary. We find where the loss actually lives in you, and we let it be as contradictory as it is — because it usually is. Relief and devastation at once. Anger at someone you still love. Grief for a marriage you know shouldn't have continued. None of that needs to be resolved into a single coherent feeling before it's allowed to exist.

It needs somewhere to be felt without being argued with.

Focusing is the ground the individual work stands on — and individual work is the heart of my practice. But attachment doesn't only live inside one person; it lives between people. The conviction stays the same wherever I'm working — underneath the conflict there's an attachment system trying to find its footing — but the method shifts depending on who's in the room.

I'm not the therapist who sits back and nods for the whole session — I'm direct, and I want to get into the weeds with you. But directness here doesn't mean interpreting your experience at you. It means slowing down enough to check: is that the real thing, or the thing above the real thing?

Emotionally Focused Therapy is the model I've trained in most extensively, over more than a decade. It works on the attachment bond itself rather than handing people techniques for arguing more politely — slowing the cycle down enough to see what each person is protecting, and what each is missing from the other.

It's the method underneath my co-parenting work. Two people who are no longer partners still have to function as one reliable attachment system for their child, and EFT is how I help them rebuild the specific trust and coordination that takes — even when the romantic relationship is fully and finally over.

The same attachment lens extends to the bond between a parent and a child. Where a lot of approaches aim at managing a child's behavior, EFFT works on repairing and strengthening the connection itself — on the understanding that a secure bond is what most of that behavior was reaching for in the first place.

This draws on real ground: about five and a half years, early in my career, working with children and families in inpatient child psychiatry and an outpatient clinic, alongside my Foundations and Essentials training in EFFT. Right now that lens lives most actively in reconnecting a parent and an adult child who've grown distant — a bond that doesn't expire just because the child is grown. Work with younger children and their families is something I'm bringing back into my practice, built on that earlier experience.

Across all of it — individual, co-parenting, family — it's the same conviction doing the work: the relationships we're built for don't stop mattering just because they've turned painful, and they can almost always be reached for again.

Focusing-oriented therapy is a client-centered form of psychotherapy based on the "felt sense" — the way our experience registers in the body before we have words for it: images, sensations, a pressure in the chest, a churning in the gut.

Often the felt sense starts blurry — neither clear nor easily understood, at the tip of our awareness. The work is to bring it slowly into focus. (That's where the name comes from — Focusing isn't about concentration or attention; it's about letting a bodily sense come into clearer view.) When we turn toward it with curiosity instead of trying to fix or explain it away, it unfolds and shows us what it's really about. That's where change happens: not by talking ourselves out of a feeling, but by letting it be known.

Focusing was developed by philosopher Eugene Gendlin, working alongside Carl Rogers, as one of the first somatic approaches to therapy — a mindfulness-based method grounded in present-moment, bodily awareness.

Focusing-oriented psychotherapists don't rush to diagnose or label, since a label rarely captures a whole person. The work is to get to the root of an experience and keep company with it — until it softens, clarifies, and shows you the way forward.