Who I Work With
If you’re looking for a quick overview of specific areas I work with, you can find this listed under “Who I Work With” in the navigation menu above. This page is an in-depth look at the kinds of experiences I work with as a therapist in Eugene, Oregon.
An Open-Ended Beginning
Across the experiences people bring to psychotherapy, certain questions surface again and again:
- Who am I in this present moment?
- How do I want to live?
- Who am I becoming?
My work engages these existential questions. Themes such as meaning, freedom, responsibility, and connection. From this Existential Lens, I anchor our conversations in presence, honesty, and genuine connection. Through this kind of encounter, clarity, coherence, and a grounded sense of being can begin to emerge.
Inner Tension
One of the most common experiences people bring into therapy is a persistent sense of anxiety or inner tension. This often shows up as a feeling of being on edge, even when nothing is immediately wrong. The mind drifts toward what might happen, what remains unresolved, or what feels uncertain or unfinished.
Anxiety frequently overlaps with the sensation of overthinking or rumination, where the mind loops in on itself in an attempt to find certainty or relief. While thinking can feel productive in the moment, it often deepens fatigue and creates distance from one’s direct experience of the present.
For others, tension takes the form of anger or irritability. Sometimes not as overt conflict, but by showing up as impatience, frustration, or a sense of being limited in some way. Reactions may feel out of proportion or confusing, often pointing toward unmet needs, unclear boundaries, or aspects of experience that have not yet been fully acknowledged or integrated.
Energy, Mood, and Loss
At other times, the problems we face are less about tension and more about the impact reality has on us. What once felt meaningful or engaging no longer does. Life can begin to feel distant, heavy, or difficult to inhabit. This experience is often described as depression, though many people experience it less as sadness and more as numbness, heaviness, or a loss of connection with what matters in life.
Others come to therapy feeling burned out or emotionally exhausted, particularly after long periods of work, caretaking, or performance. Rest may no longer feel like enough, and even small decisions can feel overwhelming. Beneath fatigue, there can be a deeper question about value and one’s life direction.
The experience of grief and loss may also be important. Grief is not limited to death. It often arises after the end of a relationship, a shift in identity, an unrealized future, or the recognition that certain chapters of life have closed. Encountering grief can be profoundly transformative, reshaping how we understand ourselves and the world around us.
Change and Patterns of Coping
Many people seek therapy during periods of change. Sometimes this follows an important transition, a career shift, or the loss of a relationship or loved one. At other times, it emerges from a readiness to become a different version of oneself. Therapy becomes a place to explore these moments with care.
The experience of being human brings real challenges, and for many people, patterns such as substance use or compulsive behaviors offer short-term relief or distraction from overwhelm, uncertainty, or isolation. These patterns are often creative attempts to cope, regulate, or protect oneself. In therapy, the work is not to judge or rush to eliminate them, but to understand what they have been responding to and what they reveal about how one has learned to live.
Men’s Mental Health and the Question of Identity
As a male therapist, I often work with men who are looking for a place to explore questions related to men’s mental health, identity, and direction in their lives. At the same time, my practice is not limited to men alone. Many of the themes explored here—questions of meaning, identity, relationships, and purpose—are shared across people of many different backgrounds and life experiences.
If this topic is of deeper interest, you may also want to explore the men’s mental health page or listen to the podcast episode When Meaning Has No Map.
Relationships and Couples Work
In addition to working with individuals, I also work with couples. Couples often seek therapy when patterns of conflict or emotional distance have become difficult to navigate on their own. At other times, couples come not because something is wrong, but because they want to better understand one another and strengthen their relationship.
My work with couples focuses on creating space for honest dialogue, emotional attunement, and a deeper understanding of how each partner’s inner world shapes the relationship. Therapy becomes a place to slow down, listen with care, and explore how freedom and responsibility are lived between two people.
Understanding, Creativity, Choice, and Integration
Therapy is often understood as a place to work through a difficult season within life. At times, that is exactly its purpose. Yet therapy can also become a space for deeper understanding—or even gnosis: a direct knowing of oneself and the world one inhabits, beyond insight alone.
For many people, their first encounter with a more vivid and awakened sense of being comes through creativity. Music, visual art, writing, or performance can open a doorway into deeper contact with the self. For others, this opening emerges during moments of rupture or transition: significant loss, existential crisis, encounters with psychedelics, or decisions that forever alter the direction of a life.
Some are drawn further still, toward the symbolic, spiritual, or mythic layers that exist beneath everyday identity. This terrain is not about belief systems or abstractions, but about meaning as it is lived and felt. Myths, inner images, and spiritual language can function as maps for experiences that resist rational explanation yet remain profoundly real.
When approached carefully and grounded in daily life, this work can support a deeper integration of insight, choice, and responsibility, allowing one to live with greater coherence, vitality, and authorship of their own existence.
An Open Invitation
What I’ve outlined above is not an exhaustive list of the experiences I work with. My work does not require a clear label or diagnosis, and for many people, not knowing is itself the most important place to begin.