I began my clinical education in 2010, training first in a community mental health center on the north side of Chicago, working with people living with severe and persistent psychological disorders. That early training put me at the intersection of psychopathology, community life, and the sociocultural dimensions of recovery-based treatment.

I completed my M.A. in Clinical Psychology from The Chicago School of Professional Psychology in 2012, then went on to earn my Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Duquesne University in 2017, in a program grounded in existential-phenomenological and psychoanalytic traditions. My dissertation examined the psychological experiences of people living with contaminated water near natural gas extraction sites in Pennsylvania — an attempt to think through trauma as something environmental and embodied, lived in a community and a landscape.

During my doctoral training, I coordinated a military psychological services program, providing veterans with trauma-informed, archetypally-focused depth psychotherapy. Alongside that work, I began a decade-long involvement in a forensic, outpatient practice, treating individuals released from federal prison for substance-abuse and mental health treatment. A predoctoral internship brought me back to community mental health, this time in a rural clinic serving residents of western Pennsylvania – and my postdoctoral hours, completed at an inpatient behavioral health hospital, made for daily work with adults in severe crisis and extreme states. 

Looking back, what these years have in common isn't a specific population or diagnostic specialty. It's a disciplined practice of attention — an ongoing commitment to the session itself as the elemental unit of clinical work, regardless of who sat across from me or what brought them there. It meant learning to meet whoever arrived, in whatever state, and doing that again the next day, across every setting I worked in.

I entered private practice in 2018. In 2020, I began psychoanalytic formation at the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis, joining an international collective of analysts, clinical and scholarly, engaged in the ongoing transmission of psychoanalysis — a body of work and practice carried forward, generation to generation, through exactly this kind of collaboration.