I am a licensed Atlanta marriage and family therapist who offers both psychological and spiritual healing and growth to my clients. I believe that everyone has within them their own wisdom, their own answers, their own resources to deal with the questions and problems that stir them to greater growth. I believe that problems or crises are the impetus that set emotional and spiritual growth in motion. Every obstacle, every setback, every personal defeat, in my view, is an invitation, an opening into a deeper way of experiencing life and life’s deeper meaning. Sometimes we just need someone to awaken in us what lies beneath our conscious knowing. Sometimes we need a slight push, a new direction, to set us back on the path we are meant to embrace.

I believe marriage and family therapy is a safe container in which each person or couple can explore their personal questions, their personal “stuckness,” their personal way out of the crisis or present circumstance in which they find themselves, so that, together, with me as their therapist, they come to their own unique answers and healing. I believe it is a spiritual journey at its core, life-altering at its best.

My Process

I invite my clients to wander with me through their personal story as we would a labyrinth until it leads us to the center of who they are. If it is an individual with whom I am working, it is soul, or their deepest longing, we choose as our guide. If it is a couple with whom I am working, it is the relationship for which they each long that is our guide. If it is a family with whom I am working, it is the unconscious stories folded into the web of their family history that is our guide. Within the story of each individual life is the story of mankind trying to fulfill its deepest longing, one person at a time.

I assist my clients in understanding that safety, “feeling safe,” is something that can only come from within, that nothing outside of us can make us feel safe in the deepest sense. Not another relationship, financial stability, success in a particular area of life — nothing can make us feel safe except the awareness that I am one with all of life and that I have all the resources I need within myself to have a complete and satisfying life. I choose to frame the goal as discovering that which makes one feel “alive” rather than what makes one feel “happy.”

I work with couples to create a third presence in the relationship — the larger container of the relationship itself rather than the singular needs of each partner — so that an “I-Thou” dialogue can take place. This obliterates the possibility of one partner manipulating the other as an object, an “It”, to be controlled or changed for their own personal benefit. Identifying the strengths and goals of each partner allows the other in the relationship to see the person before them in a new light. It is my job to reframe the core conversation between them so that each can hear the other, as if for the first time.

I realize the importance of each client’s presenting problem as the starting point in identifying clear and behavioral interventions that will ease the pain or confusion that temporarily disorients them. If I am working with couples, I focus on communication techniques that build blame-free exchange and mutual understanding, conflict resolution skills and negotiation techniques that open up the locked-down places, as well as intimacy skills that enhance mutual satisfaction in an otherwise dry, shut-down relationship.

As an Atlanta marriage and family therapist, I am deeply committed to identifying and nurturing the spiritual vitality, the life giving force, in each of my clients. As Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist, said, we are here to experience life, not just to understand or survive it. I am also dedicated to communicating to the community at large my understanding of the spiritual journey in general, with the need on all our part to understand what it means to be fully human.