Developer of Life Telling Processing\u2122 and practitioner of the Narrative Partnership. Contemplative-archetypal depth therapy for high-achieving professionals, trauma survivors, and men navigating life transitions. Virtual statewide in California.
Faith and Spiritual Integration
I am not sitting across from you as an expert with all the answers. I am entering a narrative partnership with you, a sustained, unhurried sitting with your story, in the company of someone who knows this terrain from the inside.
I did not arrive at this work through textbooks alone. I arrived here through my own story, through seasons of struggle, disorientation, and the slow, imperfect work of gathering my own broken pieces. The framework I developed, Life Telling Processing™, was not designed in the abstract. It emerged from the territory I had already walked. That is what I bring to this work: not just twenty years of clinical experience, but a genuine understanding of what it costs to face the deeper story, and what becomes possible when you do.
The vision of this site extends far beyond my private practice. Whether or not we ever work together, I hope that in visiting here you encounter an invitation and a courageous permission to reflect on, embrace, and include all chapters of your story. Every chapter. And that in doing so, a depth of wholeness becomes your truest experience.
My particular hope is that those who find this place are people for whom the success journey has run its course and something deeper is calling. This is a space built for that moment.
I have been a licensed psychotherapist in private practice for over 17 years, long enough to know that the work is never finished, and that integration is always a journey rather than a destination.
Before I became a psychotherapist, I spent over two decades in pastoral work, walking alongside people in their moments of grief, transition, and searching. I hold a Master of Divinity from Western Seminary, where I was later invited to serve as a professor, educating future therapists on the integration of faith, psychology, and the ancient healing arts. I hold a Master of Arts with a focus on Relational Psychology and am licensed in California as a Marriage and Family Therapist.
I have been a student of the deeper story for most of my adult life, not only in the therapy room, but on the road, the trail, and the track.
For many years, I have trained and competed as an endurance athlete. Long before I understood the neuroscience of narrative fragmentation, I understood something about it experientially, from the interior landscape of a long run, from the particular kind of self-knowledge that only sustained physical effort can produce. Endurance athletics, at its best, is not about performance. It is about revelation. The miles strip away the managed self and leave behind something more essential: the person you actually are when there is nothing left to perform.
I came to understand that this is precisely what Life Telling Processing™ asks of the people I work with. Not a performance of healing. A revelation of the self that has been there all along, beneath the survival strategies and the carefully maintained image.
I have sat with surgeons who run ultramarathons, executives who competed in college, and professional athletes facing the threshold of transition. In each of them, I have found that the questions the miles asked are the same questions that brought them to the therapy room. This understanding has shaped my work with athletes and high-performing professionals, where the track and the therapy room are, in the deepest sense, asking the same things: What has the journey revealed? What has it wounded? And what has it forged?
Away from my practice, I coach cross country and track and field at a local high school, walking alongside young athletes through the particular crucible of competitive endurance sport. I have learned things in that role that twenty years of clinical training alone could not have taught me: about the relationship between physical courage and psychological courage, about what it means to accompany someone through sustained discomfort toward a finish line they are not sure they can reach, and about the way the inner story a young person carries about themselves either expands or contracts under the pressure of competition.
My wife and I have been married for 36 years, a relationship that has been its own couragepath, with its own seasons of fragmentation and integration. We live on a small retreat property in Fair Oaks, at the base of the Sierra Nevada, where the rhythm of the land, unhurried and patient and shaped by forces far older than any of us, has formed the contemplative quality of presence that this work requires.
The in-person office sits in Old Fair Oaks Village, near the American River and Village Park, in the kind of place that does its own quiet work on a person before the session even begins.
All of this, the clinical training, the miles, the coaching, the marriage, the land, converges in the therapy room. Not as a collection of credentials, but as a life that has been lived with the same questions I hold with every person I work with. Who am I beneath the performance? What has the journey revealed? And what does the mosaic of this particular life, gathered and held with honesty and care, have to say about who I am becoming?
I tell you this not because my story is the point, but because I believe the person who sits with your story matters. Who they have been, what they have lived, and what the journey has asked of them.
Life Telling Processing™ (LTP) is not a borrowed framework. It is a modality I developed over years of clinical practice, pastoral care, and personal study, drawing on the neuroscience of narrative integration, the depth psychology of archetypal patterns, and the contemplative wisdom of the Christian tradition.
LTP is grounded in a simple but conviction: that our stories are not just psychological events. They are neurological ones. The way we tell our stories, or fail to tell them, shapes the very architecture of our brains. When trauma, chronic stress, or the slow accumulation of archetypal injuries fragments the narrative, healing requires more than symptom management. It requires integration.
Through LTP, I work with clients to gently gather the fragmented pieces of their story, identify the archetypal injuries driving their survival programs, and arrange those pieces into a mosaic: a life that is not just successful, but whole.
In late 2012, my life felt like it was humming along. I was teaching, seeing clients, and in the process of returning to academia to pursue a PhD. I had narrowed my search to several programs in the San Francisco Bay Area. The path forward felt clear and full of momentum.
Then, in 2013, I was in an automobile accident.
It was not the kind of accident that announces itself as catastrophic. There was no high-speed collision, no dramatic injuries visible to the outside world. But what happened inside was something I had no framework to understand. I suffered what is called a rotational brain injury, caused not by direct impact but by the rapid spinning of the head, which generates cortical tearing. The connections between brain regions that normally weave experience into a coherent story were disrupted. What followed was a prolonged season of fragmentation unlike anything I had encountered in twenty years of walking alongside others through theirs.
I lost the thread of my own story.
I did not study the terrain of masculine woundedness and then begin guiding men through it. I found myself lost inside it first. The framework that now guides this work was built, piece by piece, from the necessity of finding my own way back. There are no experts in this territory. There are only guides, and the guides worth trusting are the ones who know the terrain the way a man knows land he has lived on. Who recognize the smell of the soil after rain. Who know where the light falls in the late afternoon when a man most needs to know he is not as lost as he feels.
What I offer is a contemplative-archetypal engagement with a man's story. Not a program. Not a protocol applied from the outside in. A sustained, unhurried sitting with what he carries, in the company of the archetypal patterns that give his wound its name and the contemplative presence that gives the work its ground.
What I could not have known then was that this experience would become the ground from which Life Telling Processing™ would grow. The neuroscience I had studied, the narrative theory I had taught, the contemplative practices I had cultivated: none of them, alone, were sufficient to meet what I was facing. I had to find a way to gather the broken pieces of my own life and arrange them into something coherent and whole. I had to walk the couragepath before I could guide anyone else along it.
Life Telling Processing™ is the result of that recovery. It is not a framework I constructed from the outside. It is a path I was forced to find from the inside, during a mid-life season of teardown and rebuild that I would not have chosen and would not trade. The mosaic I offer to my clients is one I first had to build for myself.
That is what I mean when I speak of a Narrative Partnership. I am not pointing you toward a destination I have only read about. I am entering the work with you as someone who knows this particular terrain from the inside out, who has gathered his own broken pieces, and who understands what it costs to do so.
The Life Telling Processing framework continues to grow as a clinical body of work. The wound series, the five-phase protocol, and the men's work documentation represent the beginning of what I intend to develop into a formal training resource for clinicians. That work is ongoing.
I do not view therapy as a clinical transaction. I view it as an invitation.
My approach weaves together the neuroscience of how our brains process trauma and memory with ancient, contemplative wisdom. We do not try to throw away the difficult parts of your story. Instead, we look at them with compassion. We recognize that the fragmentation you feel was once a brilliant survival mechanism. And then, slowly, we begin to arrange those pieces into a mosaic that is whole, beautiful, and deeply true.
The work I do is not about fixing what is broken. It is about gathering what is scattered, honoring what has been survived, and helping you find the thread of a story that is larger, truer, and more whole than the one the performance demanded of you.
If something in what you have read here speaks to you, if you recognize the weight of the shadowlands or feel the quiet pull of a story that has not yet been fully told, I would be honored to enter a Narrative Partnership with you on that journey.
You do not have to walk it alone.