If you are here, you have already done some work to understand your situation. You can name that some pattern in your life is not serving you. You know there's a version of your life that's closer to who you want to be. You might even have specific ideas as to how. And yet, you feel stagnant, like you’re not moving in that direction, despite wanting to. It’s just not happening yet.

I know that feeling — that churning dissatisfaction inside you while you’re striving for excellence, doing everything “right” based on what you have been told about success and fulfillment. I lived that way for most of my life. I grew up in a blue-collar family from the South, where working hard was the only truth. So I worked hard. I built myself into an intellectual, a high performer, a “cultured” person who could speak French, a student of the arts who devoted her life to learning music, art, and literature. I shaped myself into someone who I thought would count as intelligent, worldly, successful. I ignored hardships around me and pushed ahead.

Living in a second language and culture is what first complicated that project. When paying such close attention to the people around you, desperate to learn how to fit in, you notice what they actually organize their lives around — and it is not work, money, or even art. It is each other. That was the first real crack in the story I had been telling myself.

I leaned into it while I was teaching French back stateside during my first master’s degree. I would find myself telling undergraduates that their health, their relationships, and their capacity to be present mattered more than memorizing verb conjugations, that a language is for connecting with people and exploring your own mind, not for climbing a ladder.

I did not take my own advice. I went on to pursue a PhD in French, and four years in, right after reaching the ABD stage, I burned out. Hard.

Pursuing excellence for the letters after my name was no longer something I could keep doing. Through mindfulness practice, through relationships I had finally started prioritizing, and through studying Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, I came to a fairly plain conclusion: I had built a life around other people's values instead of my own, ignoring my own strengths.

Insight is not action. It took burning out and changing careers to practice what I had been preaching to my students.

Learning couples and family therapy during my second (and final) master’s degree was the last piece. I learned to see relationships as systems made up of interactional cycles people build together for reasons that make perfect sense, but that can sometimes go on running long after they stop serving anyone, quietly working against the relationship. Helping people understand and improve their relationships to themselves and to each other is the career I would choose regardless, no matter how I got here.

What that means for you is that I bring an analytical and empathetic set of eyes to your life. Together we look at what you are doing, whether it aligns with what you actually value, and whether it is building the relationships you want or quietly keeping you stuck.

I balance being direct and warm. Early on my work is to understand the situation you are in — what you have tried, what you want to change, what you need. As trust builds, I push more. I will name the thing you moved past quickly. I will tell you what I see, including when it is uncomfortable, because agreement is not what you came here for. If something is not working, you can tell me, and I will adjust.

If you are ready to stop analyzing and start choosing, I would love to meet you.