Clinician, researcher, and speaker on trauma, grief, and the work of becoming whole

My work has taken me through many different spaces: community mental health and substance use services, private clinical practice, research, university teaching, professional education, writing, and consulting. For more than 26 years, I have had the privilege of sitting alongside people, families, practitioners, and communities navigating some of the more complicated places of being human.

Each part of my work continues to shape the others. Clinical practice keeps theory human. Research has taught me to question what we think we know and to listen carefully to knowledge that comes from lived experience. Teaching asks me to make ideas useful. And the people I work alongside continually remind me that there is rarely one explanation for why we struggle, heal, change, or become who we are.

I am especially drawn to experiences that can be difficult to name or neatly categorize: grief and loss, our relationships with substances, changes in identity, significant life transitions, and the spiritual, psychedelic, and non-ordinary experiences that can shift how we understand ourselves and the world around us.

I am less interested in fitting these experiences into predetermined explanations than I am in becoming curious about them. What happened? What meaning are you making of it? What has carried you through? What is asking for attention now? And what might become possible from here?

Across all of my work, I return to a belief that has become increasingly important to me: people carry profound knowledge about their own lives. My role, whether I am working as a clinician, researcher, educator, writer, or consultant, is to bring what I know into conversation with what others know, and to create the conditions for something new to become possible.