Every therapeutic approach rests upon assumptions about what it means to be human.

My own perspective has evolved through many years of work as a psychoanalyst, pastoral counselor, teacher, and student of human experience. It has also been shaped by encounters with different cultures, spiritual traditions, psychological perspectives, and the many individuals whose lives I have been privileged to accompany.

At the heart of this perspective is a simple recognition:

We come into being through relationships. From our earliest moments, our lives are shaped by our relationships with caregivers, family, community, culture, and the natural world. We are also influenced by imagination, memory, history, and those dimensions of experience that often lie beyond conscious awareness.

Contemporary culture often encourages us to think of ourselves as separate individuals whose task is to master, control, and manage life. While autonomy and personal responsibility are important, they tell only part of our story. We are relational beings. We are sustained through connection, shaped through participation, and continually influenced by realities larger than ourselves.

Over the years I have become increasingly interested in perspectives that challenge overly individualistic and hierarchical understandings of human life. Feminist scholarship, ecological thought, contemporary psychoanalysis, and contemplative traditions have all contributed to my understanding. In different ways, they emphasize relationship, mutuality, embodiment, interdependence, and respect for the living systems of which we are a part.

From this perspective, psychological suffering cannot always be understood solely as an individual problem. Our struggles often reflect disruptions within relationships—with ourselves, with others, with our bodies, with community, with the natural world, and with the deeper sources of meaning that sustain human life.

Likewise, healing is not simply a matter of self-improvement or symptom reduction. It often involves restoring connection, expanding awareness, and discovering new ways of participating in life. Our growth emerges not only through insight but also through relationship, imagination, compassion, creativity, and the capacity to engage more fully with the realities that shape us.

The questions that bring people to therapy are often inseparable from questions of belonging, meaning, love, purpose, loss, responsibility, and the search for a life that feels more fully alive.

For me, psychological growth is not about becoming a perfected self. It is about becoming more conscious, more connected, and more capable of participating in the unfolding relationships that constitute our human life.

I have gradually come to understand human life not as something fixed but as an ongoing process of becoming. We are continually shaped through our relationships, our experiences, our imagination, and the unfolding circumstances of our lives. Therapy participates in that process—not by directing it toward an ideal person we ought to become, but by helping us listen more deeply to the life already seeking expression within us.

Therapy and analysis offer one place where this process can occur. They create an opportunity to listen more carefully to oneself, to others, and to the larger life of which we are a part.