How I work

If you’ve read a couple of the essays here and found yourself thinking, alright, but who is on the other end of this, then this page is for you. It isn’t a resume. It’s an honest account of who I am and what working with me is like, so you can decide whether I’m the right person before you ever write.

Who I am

I’m a relationship coach with a background in both counseling and sociology. My orientation is what’s usually called psychodynamic, which is a technical word for a fairly simple commitment: I’m far more interested in what’s going on underneath a problem than in managing its surface. Most relationship advice works at the level of technique. Better communication scripts, date-night suggestions, rules for fair fighting. Those things aren’t useless, but they rarely touch the actual engine of the trouble, which is almost always running somewhere below the words. I’ve spent years doing this work, with people all over the world and across just about every kind of relationship difficulty there is. Working at that deeper level is the only thing I’ve seen produce change that lasts rather than just quieting down for a while.

What this is

Let me be straightforward about the frame, because it matters. What I offer is coaching, not therapy, and there are real differences between the two. If you’re in crisis, or dealing with something that needs clinical treatment, coaching isn’t the right tool, and I’ll tell you so plainly rather than take you on. What coaching with me suits is the enormous territory in between. The marriage that keeps having the same fight. The long aftermath of an affair. The slow drift apart. The sense that you’ve lost each other and can’t even name when it started. For that, working at depth with someone honest is very often exactly what helps.

What working with me is like

It’s small, and it’s direct. It’s the two of us, or the three of us if you come as a couple. I’m not going to hand you a worksheet, and I’m not going to tell you what you want to hear just to keep you comfortable. I’ll be kind, and I’ll be honest, and when those two pull in different directions I lean toward honest. Gentle dishonesty is what most people have already been getting from everyone around them, and it hasn’t helped them. The work happens online, so we can do it wherever you are. And when you reach out, you’re reaching me. There’s no team or assistant, and no funnel that routes you somewhere. You write, I read it myself, and I write back.

Who this is for, and who it isn’t

This is for people who genuinely want to understand what’s happening in their relationship and to change it, even when that turns out to be uncomfortable. It isn’t for someone looking only for quick reassurance, or for permission, or for a way to fix another person without ever looking at themselves. If you want to see clearly, and you’re willing to be surprised by what you find, that’s the work I do. It’s work I’m good at.