I've been a psychologist for a long time. I've sat with people through divorces, diagnoses, chronic emptiness, and the particular grief of not knowing why you feel the way you feel. Somewhere along the way, after years of practicing, teaching, presenting, I made a choice that surprised even me: I went back to train as a psychoanalyst in New York City. That 4-year training changed how I work. It changed how I listen. It changed, honestly, how I understand myself. And it's time I talk about it.

This blog is my attempt to pull back the curtain on something that has developed a rather unfortunate reputation online. If you've spent any time in therapy-adjacent corners of social media, you may have encountered the caricature: a bearded man with a notepad, a patient lying on a leather couch, asking "And how does that make you feel?" while the clock ticks toward the fifty-minute mark. It's parodied. It's memed. It is . . . let me be direct . . . mostly wrong.

"Psychoanalysis isn't a relic. It is one of the most rigorous, curious, and human-centered approaches to understanding ourselves that exists."

Contemporary psychoanalysis has evolved significantly from its origins. It is relational, collaborative, and alive to the present moment. Yes, we might explore the past . . . not to excavate it for blame, but to understand the patterns that quietly organize your life right now. The ways you keep yourself small. The pulls you feel toward freedom, or away from it. The relationships you repeat without quite knowing why.

What this blog is . . . and what it isn't

I want to be clear about something from the start: psychoanalytic therapy is not for everyone, and it doesn't claim to be. If you're in crisis, if you need concrete skills to manage panic attacks, if you're looking for a structured approach to a specific symptom . . . Good news! There are excellent therapists and evidence-based treatments designed precisely for that. CBT, DBT, EMDR. These modalities do real and important work. That's not what I do, and this blog isn't a case against them.

What I offer . . . and what I'll explore here . . . is something different. It's for the person who has done the symptom work and still senses something unresolved beneath the surface. For the person who finds themselves asking: Why do I keep doing that? Where does that come from? For the person who is curious, not just about feeling better, but about understanding themselves more fully.

"This is not simple stuff to decipher. But it is some of the most meaningful work I know how to do."

Why now?

Honestly? Because psychoanalysis deserves better than the internet gives it. Because I've watched people dismiss it before they've ever had a chance to understand what it actually offers. And because I've seen . . . up close, over years . . . what becomes possible when someone commits to this kind of deep, unhurried exploration of who they are.

Each post will take on a concept, a misconception, a question. We'll talk about what the couch is actually for. We'll talk about dreams . . . no, not everything means what you think it means. We'll talk about what it means to use a therapy relationship as a mirror. We'll talk about frequency, and why more is sometimes genuinely more.

I'll write the way I think: wondering and wandering, following threads, sitting with ambiguity. I hope you'll join me.