Everyone arrives with a version. I'm anxious. We fight about money. I should be over it by now. The version is usually true, and it is almost never the whole truth. It has been shaped to be carried: small enough to hold, smooth enough to say out loud, worn down by years of repeating.

My job is not to correct it. My job is to refuse to settle for it, and to wait. Underneath the story there is a person who has been mostly hidden by it, and that person is the one I'm here to see.

I think in pictures before I think in diagnoses. Not because diagnoses are useless; I'm trained in them and I use them when they help. But a person is not a category.

When you tell me about your mother's kitchen, or the phone call you didn't answer, or the way your husband goes quiet, I'm listening for the image that holds the weight. Old stories work this way. They don't explain a thing; they hold it up to the light and let you see it whole. Most of what changes in this work changes there first, before it changes at the level of what you do on a Tuesday.

Sometimes I'll tell you a story. Not to make a point, but because the story can say something neither of us can say straight yet.

Fifty minutes, by video, from wherever in California you can be alone with a door closed. It's slower than you might expect. I ask fewer questions than you'd think and stay with your answers longer. I notice what you skip. I say hard things plainly and kindly, because softening them into mush is its own kind of disrespect.

I won't rush to reassure you before I understand, and I won't hurry you toward feeling better. I'll stay with what's true for as long as the hour allows, and we'll look at it together. Some sessions are quiet. That isn't nothing happening. That's the water moving under the floor.

A person is not a problem to be solved. There is an image in each of us that is older than anything that happened to us, and it can be recovered: not mostly by effort, but by attention. That conviction comes from an old Christian tradition, older than the language of symptoms, and it is in the room whether or not we ever name it. You don't have to share it. You'll feel it in the pacing.

People who have done the reading and it hasn't helped. People who can explain exactly why they are the way they are, and the explanation hasn't set them free. People who want depth more than speed. Couples who would rather understand what's happening between them than win. Anyone who has lost someone and is tired of being told what stage they're in.

If you need someone physically in the room with you, I'm not that; I work only by video. If you're looking for a specific short-term protocol delivered by the book, you'll do better with someone who does that well. If you're in crisis and need more than a weekly hour can hold, the line at the bottom of this page will get you to someone faster than I can, and I'd rather you use it.

I'm licensed in California only, and I can see you only while you're physically in the state. I don't prescribe. I don't write custody letters or do court evaluations. I keep a small caseload on purpose, so the people I see get all of me.