Mental Health Clinician · Researcher · Writer & Educator
Making Sense of Ourselves and the World Around Us.
Exploring how our relationships, experiences, beliefs, and environments shape who we are; and how greater understanding can influence who we become.
The Questions Behind the Work - What I'm curious about
So much of who we become is shaped through our relationships, experiences, beliefs, and the environments we move through. Some of those influences are easy to recognize. Others become visible only when we begin paying closer attention to the patterns, assumptions, and stories we carry with us.
My work begins with curiosity about those influences, not simply what shapes us, but how greater understanding might change the way we relate to ourselves, connect with others, and choose what comes next.
Sometimes that curiosity begins with surprisingly simple questions:
Why do I keep repeating the same patterns?
Why do certain relationships feel so difficult?
Why is it so hard to ask for what I need?
How can I create a life that feels more aligned with who I am?
These questions rarely have simple answers. But asking them can create space for reflection, understanding, and new possibilities.
Meaningful change often begins with curiosity.
The Four Pillars - How I Organize Questions
The Four Pillars of Human Development
The questions I explore often return to four interconnected dimensions of human experience: Attachment, Identity, Meaning, and Agency.
Rather than offering a formula for how people should live or change, these four ideas provide different ways of considering how relationships and experiences shape us, how we understand ourselves, how we make sense of what happens to us, and how we choose to move forward.
Attachment
How we learn to connect.
The relationships and early experiences that shape how we understand closeness, trust, safety, and connection.
Identity
How we come to understand ourselves.
The beliefs, experiences, relationships, and stories that contribute to our evolving sense of who we are.
Meaning
How we make sense of our experiences.
The interpretations and narratives through which we understand what has happened to us and what those experiences mean.
Agency
How we choose to move forward.
Our growing sense that we can make choices, influence our direction, and help shape what comes next.
These pillars aren't intended to provide answers. They offer different places from which to ask questions.
Where This Curiosity Takes Me - What I actually Do
The questions I explore don't belong to a single discipline or setting. They move with me across clinical practice, research, writing, and education, each offering a different way to listen, learn, question, and contribute.
Clinical Practice
My clinical work is one of the places where questions about human experience become deeply personal. I work with children, adolescents, and adults navigating concerns including anxiety, perfectionism, emotional regulation difficulties, trauma, mood concerns, life transitions, relationship changes, and academic or performance-related challenges.
I provide therapy through Next Step Counseling & Neuropsychology, a collaborative practice offering neuropsychological assessment and evidence-based therapy with a particular focus on neurodevelopmental differences and trauma. NSCN's approach is neurodiversity-affirming and trauma-informed, recognizing that understanding the challenges they face.
Building strong therapeutic relationships is central to the way I work. I value creating space where clients can be honest about what they're experiencing, explore what may be shaping it, and decide for themselves what meaningful change might look like.
Visit Next Step Counseling & Neuropsychology! We are currently accepting new clients!
Research
My research experience includes The Power Within, a school-based Positive Youth Development project examping adolescent development and well-being, and the developing RELATE Study, a mixed-methods project exploring relationships among early relational experiences, locus of control, perfectionism, and achievement-related anxiety in young adults.
These projects have contributed to growing interest in how early relationships and developmental experiences my relate to agency, achievement, perfectionism, anxiety, and the ways people come to understand themselves and their possibilities.
I'm particularly interested in continuing to explore the relationships among attachment, agency, achievement, and autonomy, and how relational experiences across development may shape the way we navigate ourselves, our relationships, and the world around us.
Writing & Education
Psychology contains extraordinary ideas about how we think, feel, relate, develop, and make ssense of our experiences, but those ideas aren't always communicated in ways that feel accessible outside academic or clinical settings.
Through writing and educational content, I explore psychological research and ideas in ways that preserve their complexity while making them easier to understand, question, and connect with everyday experience.
Sometimes that exploration begins somewhere unexpected: a song, a story, a question, a cultural moment, or something I simply can't stop wondering about.
Why Curiosity Matters
Curiosity creates space where judgment once lived.
Curiosity changes the way we approach what we don't yet understand. Instead of immediately deciding that something is good or bad, right or wrong, a strength or a flaw, curiosity invites us to stay with the question a little longer.
That matters because human experience is rarely simple. The patterns we repeat, the relationships we struggle with, the beliefs we carry, and even the choices we make often develop within stories and circumstances more complicated than they first appear.
Curiosity doesn't mean excusing what causes harm or avoiding difficult truths. It means becoming willing to understand before we judge, to ask what shaped something, what continues to sustain it, and what might become possible if we saw it differently.
Perhaps that is why I keep returning to questions. Not because every question has an answer, but because the questions we're willing to ask can change what we're able to see.
Because sometimes a better question changes what becomes possible.
Continue the Conversation
If you're curious about the questions I'm exploring, the research behind them, or the ideas that emerge through my writing and educational work, I'd love to have you follow along.
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