My approach to therapy

for others, for family, for an idea of who you're supposed to be — while losing track of what's actually yours

Anger that's gone quiet, living as overwork, irony, or the slow erosion of what you want

Different person, same dynamic. Different job, same frustrations. You've noticed the pattern — you can describe it clearly — and you keep landing in it anyway. That's not a failure of intelligence or self-awareness. That's how relational patterns work. They run faster than conscious intention.

The relationships we find ourselves in aren't accidents. We're drawn to what's familiar, including what's familiar in the difficult sense — dynamics that echo early relationships, that feel charged with something older than the current situation. Part of what therapy does is make that invisible pull visible. Not to pathologize it, but to give you an actual choice about it.

Toxic dynamics — whether you're in one now or keep finding yourself in similar ones — usually involve a specific unconscious logic. A part of you that believes this is what intimacy looks like, or that you need to earn love through suffering, or that conflict is the only path to real connection. These beliefs don't respond to rational argument. They respond to depth work: slowing down, looking at where they came from, and gradually building a different experience.

I work with people who are caught in patterns they can see but can't stop. Who are exhausted by repeating the same dynamic with different people. Who want to understand not just what they're doing, but why it still makes a kind of sense — and how to genuinely change it, not just manage it better.

You say yes when you mean no. You take on things you don't have capacity for. You manage other people's emotions before your own. You know — clearly, intellectually — that this is a pattern. And then you do it again anyway.

This isn't a willpower problem. It's not that you lack assertiveness training or haven't read enough books about boundaries. People-pleasing runs deeper than behavior. It's a survival strategy that made complete sense at some point — usually early, usually in a context where keeping other people comfortable was the price of safety or belonging. The problem is that the strategy outlived the context. It's still running, in situations where it costs you more than it protects you.Boundary work is also not about becoming harder or more withholding. It's about developing a real relationship with your own limits — knowing what's actually yours, what belongs to someone else, and having the capacity to hold that distinction even when it's uncomfortable. That's a different kind of strength than most people are taught to cultivate.

There's a particular kind of anxiety that doesn't respond to breathing exercises, productivity systems, or taking a few days off. It's the kind that's been there your whole life — humming underneath everything, turning up the volume when things get quiet. You might be very good at managing it. You might have built an entire life organized around managing it. That's exhausting in a way that's hard to explain.

Burnout in this city often looks similar. Not just tiredness — a kind of depletion that doesn't lift. You're doing everything right: the job, the exercise, the nutrition, the therapy. And something still feels like it's running on empty. That's usually a sign that the burnout isn't a workload problem. It's a self problem. Something underneath the work — underneath the doing — that's never quite gotten addressed.

In the Bay Area specifically, there's a particular flavor of this: high achievers who've optimized everything external and are running on fumes internally. Who are excellent at their jobs and can't feel much at the end of the day. Who built the career and now wonder what it was for. That's not ingratitude. That's a depth problem — and depth work is what I do.

I'm not interested in coping strategies. I'm interested in what the anxiety is protecting. What the burnout has been trying to say. What would have to be true about you — about your life, your relationships, your early experience — for this level of sustained activation to make sense. That's where the actual work is.

Anxiety is almost never about what it appears to be about. It's a signal. The question is what it's pointing at.