I have a passionate commitment to provide each client with the approach and strategies that will best ensure they acquire their desired goals, prioritizing expeditious relief from unwanted symptoms. A major reason psychological pain is prolonged is because its causes remain elusive to the sufferer. Relief occurs as we discover and address their causes. Often, this only occurs in a special relationship where we feel comfortable discussing sensitive, confusing and painful issues. If efforts toward relief fail without this special relationship, as they typically do, each disappointment expands a threatening belief that we are beyond help. I lived with this threatening belief into midlife, until finding my special relationship with an extraordinary therapist. This experience played a critical role in my becoming a therapist to discover my vocational passion. In my years as a therapist, I have been honored to partner with a wide diversity of clients, facilitate their progress and witness so many of their life-affirming changes. I listen with compassion and a professional curiosity to sympathetically understand from the client’s perspective. I place the highest importance on maintaining privacy and being free of moral judgment. I nourish hope, facilitate the client’s discovering their unique path out of pain and into greater wholeness, for control over symptoms and toward the life they most authentically want. While having a psychodynamic orientation, I utilize many cognitive-behavioral strategies within a person-centered framework that prioritizes the client-therapist relationship. I have specific knowledge, experience and developed skills working with men, adolescents males, recent mothers, mother’s with adolescent boys, gender specific issues, mature/older men and women, gay and lesbian issues, and with transgendered clients. While successful in treating a wide range of mental health problems in adults and adolescents, I have specialized training and experience treating individuals with trauma, depression, mood, personality, substance-abuse, co-occurring disorders and with men’s issues.