Approach

When someone says, I feel like none of this matters, I want to understand what they mean. I try to stay with what they're saying before deciding how to respond.

That's most of what I mean when I call my work existential-phenomenological. The word existential gets used so loosely now — existential dread about deadlines, existential threats in headlines — that it's worth saying what the philosophers I read in graduate school were actually after. Heidegger and Levinas were trying to describe the conditions of being a person that we mostly arrange our lives to avoid noticing. That we will die. That no one else can do our living for us. That meaning isn't issued at birth. Anxiety, before it shows up as a symptom, is often what happens when the cover stories we've been running on stop working.

When a client touches one of those conditions in session, I don't try to get us back to the treatment plan. That is the treatment plan.

Phenomenology is the other half. It's a fancy word for a fairly simple discipline: attend to what's actually showing up before you translate it into a category you already had ready. Someone tells me, I felt like I was nothing, and it wasn't scary. The fast moves are to call that dissociation or a mystical opening. Both moves are available. Both might be partly right. But naming it that quickly takes it away from the person who hasn't yet found their own words. They'll nod. They'll also lose the experience.

I named my practice Epoché after Husserl's word for the suspension that lets something appear on its own terms. Set down what you assumed. Wait.

In the room this looks less mysterious than it sounds. It mostly means I work slowly, and I don't fill silence to make either of us less uncomfortable. The silence after someone touches something is usually where the next true thing comes from. I take the body seriously, which is why I trained in modalities — EMDR, Brainspotting, ketamine-assisted psychotherapy — that work through felt sense rather than only through talk. The mind alone cannot finish certain pieces of work. The body has to be in on it.

Pace, disagreement, and fit

If you're arriving in acute crisis, we'll start with stabilization — the slower phenomenological work is what we move toward once the ground is steadier, not where we begin. Slowness is a discipline, and it asks something of both of us. What I offer is a particular kind of attention, and a particular kind of ethics about what I do with what you bring. For people who sense that more is at stake in their suffering than a symptom inventory can hold, this tends to be the right shape.

If something isn't landing — if the work feels stuck, or the pace is wrong, or something I said missed — I want to hear it. That's not a disruption; it's the work. Therapy that can't hold disagreement isn't safe enough to hold anything that matters. And if what I'm offering turns out not to be the right shape for what you need, I'd rather help you find someone who fits than keep going with something that's merely tolerable.

Why change lasts

You can understand a pattern for years and still live inside it. That's not a failure of insight. It's where the learning lives: not in ideas but in emotional memory — conclusions your nervous system drew when something happened, kept alive because they once kept you safe. Understanding them doesn't update them. What updates them, on the account I find most convincing, is memory reconsolidation: a memory becomes briefly revisable when it's vividly reactivated and then met with an experience that contradicts what it predicts. Not argued with. Met.

If that account holds, it's what the experiential methods have in common. EMDR, Brainspotting, the ketamine window — different doors to the same event: the old learning alive in the room, and something present that doesn't match it. It's also why the phenomenology isn't decoration. Attending to what actually shows up, before the ready-made category arrives, is how the material gets vivid enough, specific enough, to be workable at all.

I hold this the way I hold any live scientific account. Reconsolidation is well established in the laboratory; that it's the mechanism of lasting psychotherapeutic change is a strong hypothesis, not a settled fact.

You can read the fuller account, with the research it rests on, in How Therapy Changes Memory.

None of this makes me skeptical of technique. I'm EMDRIA Certified and a Consultant-in-Training, Certified in Brainspotting, trained in Flash, and hold the Professional Certificate in Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP). I learned these because I don't want understanding to be the limit of what I can offer. My orientation tells me when to reach for a tool, how to hold it once I have, and when to put it down. EMDR runs cleaner when I'm attending to the person and not just the protocol. KAP, with medicine in the room, depends on whether I can hold an opening without inflating it.

I also draw on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) often. We look at what you've organized your life around, and whether that's what you would choose. Defusion means noticing a thought as a thought, without automatically treating it as fact. These conversations are part of my work with anxiety and developmental trauma.