About
How I came to this work, what shaped it, and why it takes this form.
I came to this work through my own life, not through a course or a program.
In my twenties I stumbled into depth psychology and philosophy, read some of it, and set it down. I was eager to do life, not examine it, and the material didn't grab me the way it would later. It took another twenty years of navigating quite a lot of my own material, then becoming a father and arriving somewhere in the middle of life, to send me back.
So I read and studied with purpose, actively and passively, following things as they unfolded. Not in a strictly academic sense. I was building a working understanding, not checking boxes for a degree. I moved through family systems, attachment theory, schema work, the structural thinkers in clinical psychology, following footnotes into varied topics far afield but relevant, and then back into Jung by way of Hollis, Edinger, Hillman, Murray Stein and others.
I have worked across a wide range of things over the decades: owning retail ventures, pipe organ restoration, emergency medical work, handyman labor for people who needed someone reliable, personal training and nutrition, consulting startups, local politics, and twenty years of small business and advertising consulting. The through line in all of it was not the field. It was the quality of attention the work required, and the relationships that formed around it.
The calling to help had been there for a long time. I had considered, at various points, becoming a therapist, a doctor, a social worker, an addiction counselor. Each time I set it aside to keep building something that seemed more practical, more socially legible, more like a life of the sort that looks good on paper. At some point it became clear that I had been answering the calling informally all along, in daily life, in the relationships that formed around it, in the phone calls that were never really about whatever they were supposed to be about. What changed was not the calling. What changed was my willingness to stop treating it as a whim and build around it directly.
I considered the clinical route and set it aside. Diagnosis, treatment, and crisis intervention is real and necessary work, and it is not mine. The people I want to work with are not in crisis. They are functioning, often well, and nonetheless living with questions that the clinical framework was not built to address.