Narrative Therapy
You are not your problem. We separate you from it, examine the stories you've inherited, and rewrite the ones that no longer fit who you're becoming.
Approach
How the work actually works.
Two disciplines do most of the heavy lifting: Narrative Therapy and Philosophical Taoism. None of it is about fixing you. There's nothing in you to fix. There's a story to re-tell and an energy to point back in its correct direction.
Narrative therapy is a talk therapy that separates you from the problem you came in with, so you can look at it clearly and change your relationship to it. I combine it with philosophical Taoism, working with men, artists, couples, and teens.
Philosophical Taoism
Less forcing, more flowing. Wu wei, actionless action, isn't passivity. It's the recognition that your nature isn't the problem, and forcing it never was the answer. The most durable change doesn't come from pushing harder; it comes from finding what's already trying to move and getting out of its way.
Honest Conversation
Being a therapist isn't a call-in job where you ramble for years and nothing moves. I'll tell you the truth, cuss when it's warranted, and stay in it with you. You'll always know where you stand.
Four Domains
Somatic, Intellectual, Emotional, and Spiritual. We keep an eye on all four, because no life ever changed in just one of them.
The Journal
Essays worth returning to.
Scribbling at the intersection of Poetics, Postmodern Psychology, EcoEcstacy, and Taoism. In your inbox.
Subscribe on Substack“Decadence is sophistication in the absence of substance, a hall of mirrors that masquerades as self-improvement. I'm not here to add to it. I'm here to clear what's in the way of the identity that already works.”
All energy needs to find its correct course.
The Taoist wisdom doesn't ask you to eliminate what's troubling you, instead we figure out what those patterns are trying to tell you. Worry, grief, anger, shame are not disorders to be removed. They're innocent energies waiting to find their correct course. My work is in the recognition and then transmutation, not suppression.
"Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man."
Zhuangzi, The Butterfly as Companion: Meditations on the First Three Chapters of the Chuang Tzu
Worry → Competency
Worry is attention that hasn't been handed its work. Give it a direction and it becomes competence.
Addiction → Connection
Underneath the craving is a need for connection that got rerouted. We follow it back to people.
Anger → Boundaries
Anger is information. It marks the line that matters, we learn to read it early and say it plainly.
Grief → Devotion
Grief is the receipt for having loved. Its course was never getting over it; it's devotion.
Shame → Belonging
Shame insists you're too much, or not enough, to be loved. Being truly known is how you call its bluff.
Fear → Aliveness
Fear tends to show up exactly where the aliveness is. We move toward it, your pace, your terms.
Questions about the approach.
What is narrative therapy?
Narrative therapy is a collaborative, non-pathologizing approach developed by Michael White and David Epston. It treats you as the expert on your own life and the problem as something separate from you, shaped by stories you absorbed from family, culture, and conditioning. We name the problem, look at how it operates, find the times it hasn't run the show, and build a new story from those exceptions.
What does Taoist therapy look like in a session?
It looks like a conversation. Philosophical Taoism is a way of thinking, not a belief system I ask you to adopt, and you need no background in it. We pay attention to where you're forcing something and where energy is already trying to move. Worry, grief, anger, and shame get treated as information about where that energy needs to go, not as disorders to remove. Then we work on pointing it there.
Do you take insurance?
No. I'm a private pay practice, out-of-network with all insurers. I provide superbills you can submit to your insurance company for potential partial reimbursement. Working outside the insurance system keeps your care private and free of diagnosis requirements or session limits set by a third party.
Who do you use this approach with?
Men of every orientation and gender history, artists and makers, business owners and founders, couples, and teens. Sessions are online anywhere in California, or in person in Hancock Park, Los Angeles. The first 20-minute consultation is free.
Which one of those is yours?
Most people already know which energy they're carrying. The work is pointing it somewhere. Twenty minutes, free, is where that starts.
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