A little about how I got here
Back in high school, when people asked what I planned to do with my life, I was pretty sure I was going to study chimpanzees with Jane Goodall in Africa.
More schooling wasn't terribly appealing at the time, so I figured the next best thing to chimps was humans—and one of the fastest and most interesting routes to reliable job was psychiatric nursing.
Somehow, that led to working with people experiencing mental health difficulties and in conflict with the law.
Things unfolded from there.
People still amaze me
Over the years, I've encountered an extraordinary range of human experience—flourishing and floundering, struggle and adaptation, wandering and meandering, and possibilities appearing where none seemed particularly obvious.
My curiosity has increasingly settled on experience itself: how we live with it, make meaning from it, organize around it, and discover ways of being within circumstances we may or may not have chosen.
That curiosity has followed me everywhere.
The long way around
My professional path has wandered through psychiatric nursing, clinical practice, trauma and dissociation, somatic psychotherapy, research, teaching, consultation, supervision, curriculum development and writing.
Along the way, I've had opportunities to learn and work with people across Canada and internationally—from therapy rooms and university classrooms to professional trainings and conference halls.
These days...
Many of those paths are converging in Wayfinding—an evolving approach to therapeutic practice grounded in curiosity about experience, the conditions in which it arises, and the many ways human beings find ways to live, adapt, change and become.
My book, Trauma and Somatic Healing: Wayfinding and the Intelligence of Experience in Therapeutic Practice, brings much of that thinking together.
I'm still learning, consulting, writing and maintaining a small clinical practice. I'm also still following interesting questions to see where they lead.
That is probably enough about me.
What are you wondering about?