About Me

I spent most of middle school looking for solid ground. My family was changing shape underneath me.  We moved often, and every move meant a new school, new faces, and the constant change of structure and family connections I had as a kid. I was always the new one, and I never found my people. But by the end of high school, I'd found something that help me feel like I finally belonged. I drank and smoke, searching for connection and a way to a way to go quiet inside. I kept my grades up. I showed up to school, showed up to work, looked — from the outside — like a kid who had it together. Inside, I was barely holding on.

I experimented with anything that would give me a different experience. The summer after high school I survived a car crash that should have killed me and the friend driving. I nearly failed out of my first college a year later.None of it was enough to make me change. I was stubborn, and experimenting became all to normal.  It took a summer of volunteering, of getitng outside and spending time alone to finally crack the shell. I asked for help from my family. From God. I just knew I needed something different. Thankfully, things started to change.

The work I found afterward wasn't a career plan. It was a continuation of that same rescue, paid forward. I taught outdoor education to elementary kids, then guided adolescents through adventure camps, wilderness therapy, and rites-of-passage programs. I became a mentor in residential treatment, built an aftercare program for young adults leaving it, and eventually moved into admissions, helping families find their own way.

Twenty years in, I'm still doing versions of that same work: helping parents and children find their way back to each other, toward independence that doesn't require estrangement and accountability that doesn't require shame. I'm a parent myself now, to a teenager and a young adult, and that has humbled me in ways client work never could. I've watched people hit real bottom and real height. I still have my own demons; I don't pretend otherwise. What I've learned is that growth isn't a destination you arrive at and then get to stop working. It's daily. It's cleaning your own mirror and taking care of your side of the street before you ask anyone else about there work. It's staying close to the mentors who shaped me, staying present with the people I love, and making room for the things that are mine. Because that's the same thing I ask of every family and every client who allows me to walk with them on their path.