How I work

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

Who I am

I am a relationship coach with a background in both psychology and sociology, and my orientation is what is usually called psychodynamic, which is a technical word for a fairly simple commitment: I am far more interested in what is 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 are not useless, but they rarely touch the actual engine of the trouble, which is almost always running somewhere below the words. I have spent years doing this work, with people all over the world and across just about every kind of relationship difficulty there is, and working at that deeper level is the only thing I have 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 are in crisis, or dealing with something that needs clinical treatment, coaching is not the right tool, and I will tell you so plainly rather than take you on. What coaching with me is well suited for 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 have lost each other and cannot 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 is small, and it is direct. It is the two of us, or the three of us if you come as a couple. I am not going to hand you a worksheet, and I am not going to tell you what you want to hear just to keep you comfortable. I will be kind, and I will be honest, and when those two pull in different directions I lean toward honest, because gentle dishonesty is what most people have already been getting from everyone around them, and it has not helped them. The work happens online, which means we can do it wherever you are. And when you reach out, you are reaching me. There is 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 is not

This is for people who genuinely want to understand what is happening in their relationship and to change it, even when that turns out to be uncomfortable. It is not 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 are willing to be surprised by what you find, that is the work I do, and it is work I am good at.