On the path here

The route into psychotherapy was indirect, which I think made it more honest.

I grew up in Greece, trained in classical piano from early childhood — twenty years of discipline, performance, and the particular psychological cost of organizing a self around a craft that demands total commitment before you're old enough to choose it. Alongside that I was studying, moving between worlds, learning what it meant to belong to systems that had their own logic, their own hierarchies of power, their own versions of who you were supposed to become.

My undergraduate years at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens gave me a framework for thinking about culture, music, and the structures that organize human meaning and suffering. The American College of Greece added a lens on systems thinking— how power moves through institutions, not just people. From there, the Fletcher School at Tufts sharpened that into something more precise in the places where institutions and the individual human experience intersect in ways that are rarely clean.

I worked a decade in philanthropy, often finding myself in rooms where the stakes were real across the gap between stated values and actual behavior. That work taught me to read what isn't being said. To track the distance between a person's public position and their private experience. To notice when an organization — or a person — is performing coherence rather than living it.

The move into psychotherapy wasn't a change of subject but rather a change of scale — from systems to the individual psyche, with the same core questions intact. I've completed my clinical training at the Integral Counseling Center at Pierce Street in San Francisco.