I believe that a deep, authentic therapeutic relationship with a highly trained, dedicated psychoanalytic clinician offers an experience unlike any other. Such a connection provides the foundation for a dynamic, generative process that helps people explore and work through their most difficult challenges. Within the safety of a professional therapeutic relationship, a meaningful inner and interpersonal exploration can be co-created, fostering self-knowledge, acceptance, creativity, truth, love, and adaptation as destructive, self-limiting, self-sabotaging behaviors are worked through. Over time, this work supports genuine internal change, paving the way for real external transformation and allowing people to create more satisfying lives that align with their true selves. My perspective is shaped by over a decade of clinical experience, personal growth through this work, and a tested faith in the process for those who seek it. In my experience, this approach is often most helpful for those who want to go deep and haven’t found lasting relief through other types of therapies and/or psychotropic medication. I offer a treatment approach that typically suits those disenchanted with the superficial, mechanistic approach of mainstream mental health care, who are seeking not just help from a trusted professional, but a profoundly soulful, attuned exploration in a healing relationship that grants freedom in their life- something truer, more lasting, and alive to the whole of who they are.

While I work with people from all walks of life, I have extensive experience working with business owners, executives, academics, higher-education students (undergraduate, graduate, postdoctoral), engineers, artists/creatives, healthcare providers, veterinarians, first responders, military service members, mothers, and farmers. I am also familiar in working with individuals from a variety of spiritual, religious, and philosophical backgrounds and practices, including Roman Catholic, Christian, Latter-Day Saints (Mormon), Jewish, Atheist, Agnostic, Pagan/Wiccan, New Age, Buddhist, and Hindu traditions. In addition, I have particular expertise in helping those who grew up in poverty, fringe communities, cults, and highly dysfunctional family, social, and/or political systems where psychological, physical, economic, and/or sexual abuse and/or neglect- and the normalization and negation of that abuse and/or neglect- are/were chronic and pervasive.

Emotional healing, like physical healing, is not a quick or mechanical process. It requires time, sustained effort, and a willingness to remain with discomfort long enough to learn something new. As the neuropsychoanalyst Mark Solms has articulated, our emotional suffering is not random or meaningless or a simple materialist ‘chemical imbalance’; feelings are signals of unmet needs, shaped by deeply ingrained, often unconscious patterns of responding to the world that were helpful at one time but no longer work in the present. While medications or short-term therapies can help reduce acute distress, they primarily address surface symptoms and rarely transform the underlying dynamics across emotions, thoughts, and actions that continue to generate suffering.

Respectively, long-term psychodynamic and psychoanalytic work offers a different kind of healing. Within a reliable and supportive therapeutic relationship, emotions that once felt overwhelming or intolerable can be approached with curiosity and care. Difficult feelings such a fear, sadness, anger/rage, hate, guilt, shame, and helplessness are understood not as problems to eliminate, but as meaningful communications that point to unmet needs and longstanding relational compromises. Over time, these emotional patterns can be brought into awareness, re-experienced, and gradually revised, allowing for deeper regulation and integration rather than suppression and create root healing. Together, we work to listen carefully to your emotional world, to understand where these feelings come from, how they have shaped your ways of loving, working, protecting yourself, and seeking connection, and what they may be asking for now. This process fosters self-compassion, insight, and the development of more flexible and life-affirming ways of being. Psychoanalysis is, at its core, an inclusive exploration of the inner life, yet its effects often extend outward. Many patients discover new internal capacities to love more freely, to engage in meaningful work, and to live with greater vitality and satisfaction as these deeper patterns are gradually transformed.

While there are many perspectives and viewpoints in psychoanalysis and I respect many ways of working and thinking, I find that I am able to help people best when my work is grounded in classical and contemporary Freudian, British Object Relations, British Independent, Transference-Focused, Neuropsychoanalysis, and Intersubjective psychoanalytic orientations. I also draw from the universal wisdom of art, music, classical literature, philosophy, theater, nature, nursing, anthropology, sociological, and spiritual perspectives. Of course, I tailor my approach to the unique needs of each individual, couple, family, or group- integrating various modalities as appropriate, but always guided by psychoanalytic ways of thinking and working because they have been proven to be most profound and helpful.

To engage in meaningful, transformative work, meeting at least once per week is essential. Less frequent sessions leave too much space between for the sustained exploration and continuity that actual change requires. In addition to psychoanalytic psychotherapy, I offer holistic psychiatric care as a triple board-certified nurse practitioner. This includes thoughtful, minimalist psychotropic medication management, as well as support for lifestyle and wellness integration- incorporating gut health, herbalism, nutrition, and assistance with de-prescribing for those wishing to reduce or discontinue medications. I do not initiate or maintain prescriptions for controlled or addictive substances (such as stimulants, sedatives, benzodiazepines, or certain pain medications) under any circumstances. Rather than masking symptoms, I view discomfort and emotional distress as meaningful signals- messages to be acknowledged, explored, and understood as part of the healing process. In my experience, it is through facing and working through painful realities that grieving is possible and can lead towards authenticity, fulfillment, and profound well-being. Suffering is only truly unbearable when faced in isolation, and I am here alongside your journey.

I provide care both in person at my office in Canandaigua, nestled in New York’s Finger Lakes region, and virtually for patients in Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, & New York. If you are located in a state where I am not licensed and want to start treatment, please get in touch with me to discuss the process of obtaining a license in your state of residence. While virtual sessions offer valuable accessibility and convenience, I strongly encourage all patients to meet with me in person at least once per year. I am currently accepting new patients through a waitlist. If you would like to be considered for future openings, please feel welcome to reach out.