My path to psychology was not a traditional one. After graduating college with a BA in political science, I found myself gripped like never before by the problem of human freedom (not least, my own). Of all the things one could do, how does one know what to do? Initially, questions like this one were meant to help me answer something important about myself and my own life. In time, though, I found an unwavering interest – and more than some degree of consolation – in the universality of problems like these. After all, each of us contends daily with the constitutive features of human life – responsibility, meaning, loss, and right action in the world, to name a few.

​

In spending time with the question – “What ought we human beings do?” – I learned that action without reflection is too empty, while reflection without action is too lifeless. That is, reflection and action, at their most beneficial, are two sides of one coin. To spend our lives doing the right things, things that are good for us but also good in the ethical sense, we must be willing to slow down and introspect. We must be willing, even eager, to know ourselves more intimately. Frantic action in the world is easy, as is taking no action. What’s hard – what’s meaningful and important and rewarding – is coming to understand oneself in such a way that one’s values and behavior are finally brought into harmony. To my mind, self-possession, self-knowledge, and self-awareness are prerequisites to “doing” in a way one can live with, necessities to living in a way one finds fulfilling and satisfying and good. My foremost clinical goal is to help people do existence in the way that serves them best, with respect to not just mental health symptoms but also self-regard and virtue.

​

Paradoxically, asking the biggest, most difficult questions about the nature of both reality and ourselves can often prompt the most practical change because doing so helps us to become more awake, more alive, and more purposeful within our own individual lives. When I was young, all at once startled by the strange fact of existence, I wondered about all the following and more: What makes people prone to self-deceit and self-sabotage? Why do some people see more of reality than others? Feel more deeply than others? Have more capacity (or willingness) than others to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously? Assuming we share one material world, how do different people draw from it wildly disparate interpretations? What does it really mean for someone to change themselves for the better? And perhaps most important of all, how exactly would one go about doing so? These questions, which are no doubt philosophical, are also inescapably personal for anyone who dares to ask them.

​

For me, such questions meant studying philosophy, thinking critically, and practicing contemplation on my own, until eventually pursuing the discipline of psychology. Given my interests, I sought training in clinical psychology at the University of Toledo as part of its Psychological Assessment Lab, which concerns itself with understanding not just the psychology of human beings in general but also the idiosyncratic psychologies of individual persons. While there, my work focused on personality development and differences, the assessment of personality and psychopathology, and psychoanalytic theories and therapies, especially object relations and interpersonal approaches.

​

I completed both my pre-doctoral and post-doctoral work at HMS, where I was further trained in the treatment of various types and degrees of human strife using integrative treatment methods, including humanistic, psychoanalytic, and dialectical- and cognitive-behavioral paradigms. For pre-doctoral internship, I trained at BIDMC/Massachusetts Mental Health Center/HMS, where my focus was treating personality disordered patients using Dialectical Behavioral and Psychodynamic Therapy. For post-doctoral fellowship, I trained at Cambridge Health Alliance/HMS in a 2-year psychotherapy program, which focused on treating a wide array of psychiatric trouble with psychodynamic therapies. Since completing my post-doc in the summer of 2019, I have been appointed faculty at HMS, teaching and supervising within the Psychiatry Department.

​

Uniting all I have studied, formally and otherwise, is a deep respect for not only the so-called symptoms a person carries but also the varied processes which have brought them about and the problems they pose to living a good life. By way of my own life experience, I have learned that human beings are not helped nor healed when reduced to any one of their component pieces, symptoms or otherwise. We are too complex for something so simplistic. What I have found, instead, is that our lives become both practically better and more meaningful when we approach them with curiosity, care, and fairness, when we take ourselves to be complex and deserving of our own wonder.