My Philosophy

I believe that suffering is not a pathology to be eradicated, nor a badge to be worn. It is a message — one that deserves reverence, curiosity, and time. My role is not to paper over your pain with coping strategies or platitudes. It is to help you make contact with what lies beneath it.

In a therapeutic culture increasingly dominated by comfort, convenience, and tools, this practice is oriented toward truth, depth, and transformation. Here, change is not quick — but it is real. Our work will engage the deeper architecture of the psyche: the unconscious beliefs, survival strategies, and relational patterns that shape how you experience yourself and others.

A Practice for Those Who Are Ready

I work with thoughtful, searching adults — some returning to therapy after finding that past work, while supportive, didn’t reach the deeper layers. Others are men seeking therapy for the first time, drawn to a space that respects their intelligence and challenges them without shame.

My patients are competent, kind, and high-functioning — yet often burdened, stuck, or quietly overwhelmed. They want more than tools. They want depth. And a therapist who can go there with them.

How I Work

I don’t just listen passively. I track patterns, challenge what doesn’t add up, and speak directly to the tension in the room. I’m relentlessly curious, especially when your defenses kick in — because that’s often where the gold is buried: just beneath what you’re trying not to feel or say.

While our work will unfold collaboratively, I don’t believe in endlessly orbiting your story. I’ll help you go deeper, faster — not by rushing, but by refusing to collude with avoidance.

My approach is grounded in psychodynamic theory and Control-Mastery Theory, which means I pay close attention to the unconscious beliefs and early relational dynamics that continue to shape your present — often without your awareness. We’ll work to surface those old blueprints so they can be revised, not just analyzed. Informed by Control-Mastery Theory, I also hold a deep respect for the ways your psyche has strategically adapted to survive — even when those adaptations now cause distress. Therapy isn’t about dismantling your defenses for the sake of it. It’s about honoring the logic behind them — and then helping you test, over time, whether they’re still necessary.

Relationally, I show up as a real person in the room. I don’t hide behind a blank screen. I’m invested, emotionally attuned, and willing to name what’s happening between us if it seems important — because how you relate to me will often echo how you’ve learned to relate to others. When those moments arise, we won’t just analyze them. We’ll experience and explore them together, in real time.

Insight is powerful, but it’s not the final destination. It’s the moment the pattern comes into view — the threshold where real choice becomes possible. From there, the work is to integrate that insight into how you live, relate, and decide.

This is therapy as reckoning: structured, searching, and alive.

Why I Started This Practice

I founded Descend-to-Ascend to offer something rare: a space that values integrity over appeasement, depth over expediency. Too many clinical settings either rush to suppress symptoms or glorify suffering as an identity. In both cases, something essential is lost. What gets pathologized too quickly, or elevated too automatically, is rarely understood.

I wanted to create something else — a space where pain is honored as meaningful, not bypassed or romanticized. Where the goal is not just to feel better, but to become more whole. That kind of transformation doesn’t happen on the surface. It requires entering into a deeper conversation with the self — one that’s often disorienting at first, but ultimately clarifying.

This practice was born out of my belief that suffering has structure, that the things we call symptoms often reflect hard-won strategies for surviving what was once unbearable. Many of the people I work with have spent years feeling "off," disconnected, or fragmented — not because something is wrong with them, but because something true in them had to be put away too soon. The psyche does this to protect us. But over time, what once kept us safe can start to keep us small.

The therapeutic task is not to declare war on those adaptations, but to understand their purpose — to trace their logic and make meaning of the pain they were designed to hold at bay. When that happens, change doesn’t come from striving — it comes from contact. And from that contact, new choices emerge.

This work is about more than coping. It’s about making room for what was previously unwelcome — grief, anger, shame, longing, ambivalence, contradiction — and discovering that those disowned parts were never the problem. They were messengers. And they were waiting to be heard.

Therapy, at its best, is not about self-improvement. It’s about self-recovery — a return to something essential that was never truly lost, only submerged. It's a slow and sacred process of reassembling the parts of you that still remember who you are, beneath the performances, compromises, and inherited scripts.

That’s not a linear journey. It requires honesty, courage, and the willingness to sit with complexity rather than resolve it too quickly. It’s about staying in the room with what’s unresolved — not to suffer endlessly, but to let the truth reveal itself in time.

It is, in the end, the effort to recover what we never lost.