Individual and Couples Sessions

I offer individual and couples sessions that incorporate the best of traditional models of psychotherapy, counseling, and coaching while avoiding the limitations of these approaches. My work is custom-tailored to each person, rather than making you fit into a pre-fab framework that may or may not be optimized for your needs and situation.

What I call "cognitive permaculture" is my approach to helping you cultivate the sort of world you want to experience. We are all ecosystems unto ourselves, and real, lasting change for such complex systems requires much more than a reductionistic diagnosis of a mental "disorder" or "illness" and a set of formulaic techniques to address whatever symptoms are prompting you to seek support. I do not try to "fix" people, because I do not believe that people are "broken" or have a "disorder" just because they experience difficult physical-psychological symptoms from time to time. This is the human condition. It's not all butterflies, puppies and rainbows all the time, and that's normal -- especially in this day and age.

Addressing Root Causes, Not Symptoms

Modern psychological science and medicine are obsessed with finding faults within people. In the past century, researchers and clinicians have invented literally hundreds of "conditions," "illnesses," and "pathologies" supposedly describing what's "wrong" with someone when they experience difficult symptoms such as depression, anxiety, insomnia, attention challenges, chronic pain, and the like. These are symptoms of something out of balance, not stand-alone conditions or illnesses in and of themselves.

For example, depression is not a "mental illness." Depression is a symptom of significant and/or chronic neurophysiological dysregulation. This means that it is the emotional/phenomenological dimension of a nervous system being out of balance to a significant degree and/or a significant period of time. Anxiety is the other side of the same coin. (Almost everyone who experiences depression also experiences anxiety. It is extremely rare for someone to feel only one of these.)

A wide range of challenges people seek to redress through various forms of therapy, coaching, counseling, and medical treatment actually share an underlying core state of being: neurophysiological dysregulation. The nervous system (of which the brain is a part) is an immensely powerful system that affects literally every aspect of our being; every cell, all our organs, all biological systems -- everything from immune function, hormones, metabolism, circadian rhythms, perception, respiration, circulation, anatomy/movement, sleep, digestion, neurological activity, our microbiome, communication, and even gene expression. When our nervous systems are chronically dysregulated, everything else is affected.

A lot of traditional methods in mainstream therapy and medicine treat the symptoms of this neurophysiological dysregulation, but do little or nothing to address the root cause. This is why, after decades and literally billions of dollars spent on anti-depressants, rates of depression and anxiety are at an all-time high in the U.S. and other industrialized societies. Drugs can create the impression of a change because they temporarily alter chemical balances that lead to a person feeling different while taking them. But a chemical imbalance is not the cause of depression, it is a symptom. The underlying, root cause is an acute event or series of life experiences that trigger a person into a defensive/survival/protective response. This manifests in a "dysregulated" nervous system condition: hyperactivity (excessive sympathetic nervous system activation) and/or hypoactivity (insufficient/depressed nervous activity). When this state of nervous system disruption persists over time and becomes chronic, all the rest of our bodily/mental systems are compromised. In this compromised state, health begins to suffer and this manifests as any number of symptoms indicating that something is "off."

Regulating nervous system activity is absolutely necessary to resolve a wide range of experiences that plague people in the industrialized world. Depression, anxiety, insomnia, IBS, chronic pain, so-called ADHD/ADD, OCD, addictions/compulsions, maladaptive relational attachments and communication difficulties, lethargy, skin conditions, PTSD, metabolic disorders, respiration difficulties, and a host of other symptoms/conditions all share a similar, underlying pattern of dysregulated neurobiology/physiology. If this core pattern is not addressed, all other treatments and medications will be limited.

Given this, cognitive permaculture is rooted in somatic practices that address this dysregulated body/mind state. I say "body/mind" state because there is literally no difference between what the English language calls the "physical body" and the "mental mind." I wrote my PhD dissertation on this basic, but mistaken, ontological duality, tracing the origins of this dichotomy to a basic error made by a philosopher over 2,500 years ago. All our best sciences now confirm that there is no such simplistic mind-body divide or separation. Everything physical is simultaneously "mental," and everything mental has a physical component. It is all wrapped up together.

So, my approach to somatics is unique because I don't just work with "the body" -- I engage the somatic dimensions of our experience in a way that keeps them inextricably linked to everything else in our cognitive ecosystems: emotion, communication, perception, conceptual thought/reflection, creativity, anatomy/movement, metabolic health and well-being, etc.

The whole idea of "cognitive permaculture" is that we quite literally are ecosystems and not simple, singular "things" that exist in isolation from everything around us. This means that no part of us can be altered in isolation from all the rest. Cognitive permaculture takes a holistic approach to your situation and needs, seeing everything as interconnected and working with those dynamic connections and patterns so that you can not only resolve unpleasant symptoms but learn to resource your unique cognitive ecology so that you can sustainably thrive throughout the whole of life.