About
Background
I have been fortunate enough to have accrued a lot of diverse experiences over the course of my life: Collegiate athlete, Soldier, University Chaplain, Professor, Academic Advisor, Major and Career Exploration Coach, working musician. I’ve also lived and worked in several foreign countries. Also, like my clients I’ve experienced suffering, loss, and hardship and thus I see myself as a fellow traveler with my clients along life’s often difficult path and not as someone who is above these difficulties or immune to their impact on one’s mental and physical health.
Influences
It was during a theory class back in 2006 that I first discovered Existential approaches to psychotherapy. It was my first exposure to Viktor Frankl (author of Man’s Search for Meaning) and his approach to psychotherapy known as Logotherapy. Logotherapy is a therapeutic approach that focuses on helping people find meaning in their lives, the assumption being that the absence of meaning is often at the root of much of our distress in life. As someone who had spent most of my life searching for meaning, and as someone who had spent years reading existential writers like Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and others, the notion that these ideas were the foundation for an entire approach to psychotherapy was incredibly exciting. Over time, I learned that there are very practical ways to take these “big” ideas and incorporate them into our daily lives.
One thing I’ve noticed in over twenty years of reading about psychology, philosophy, religion, and spirituality is that there is truly “nothing new under the sun”. Most, if not all, of the most effective approaches in psychotherapy, and the approaches I tend to use in my own practice, are repackaged ideas drawn from wisdom traditions that have been a part of human history and thinking from the beginning. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is heavily based on Stoic Philosophy, Mindfulness approaches (which have continued to be supported by empirical research) are based on various meditation practices from numerous traditions, like Buddhism, Internal Family Systems, is influenced by the ideas of Carl Jung, whose ideas are heavily rooted in ancient mythological tradition…the list goes on. Over the years, empirical research has supported the effectiveness of these approaches, basically telling us a lot of what we already knew to some extent.
Literature, art, film, and music also heavily influence my approach to therapy. Lawrence LeShan, pioneer in psychotherapy for cancer support, stated “There is more about being human in a volume of Tolstoy, or Dostoevsky, or the plays of Shakespeare than there is in the psychology textbooks used in our colleges”. As someone who has completed three graduate degrees in the social and psychological sciences, I would say I almost entirely agree. Story and the experience of art and music frame our existence in so many ways and they provide fantastic metaphorical windows into understanding ourselves and the world we live in.
