Therapy for Veterans, Military & First Responders

At some point, none of this necessarily feels unusual anymore.

It may simply feel like how you live.

Compartmentalizing can get you through a shift, deployment, investigation, emergency, loss, critical incident, or another day when people are depending on you.

It can be much harder when the person you love asks:

“What are you feeling?”

Being decisive can keep people safe. At home, sharing control may feel considerably harder.

Staying alert can protect you. It can also make sleep, intimacy, vacations, crowded restaurants, parenting, or simply sitting still surprisingly difficult.

Dark humor may have helped you and the people beside you carry things that were otherwise unbearable. Then you come home and realize the people you love don't always understand why you're laughing.

The goal isn't to strip away the parts of you that helped you survive. It is figuring out which ones you still need, which ones are costing you something now, and how to have more choice.

Maybe your parent served. And their parent served.

Maybe your family includes generations of military members, law enforcement officers, firefighters, medics, nurses, corrections professionals, dispatchers, or other people who learned very early that you take care of your own.

Service can become part of a family's identity.

There can be enormous pride in that lineage. There can also be patterns nobody ever had language for.

Things one generation survived can quietly become the rules the next generation learns to live by.

Therapy doesn't have to ask you to reject where you come from.

Sometimes the work is deciding what you want to carry forward. And what you don't want to hand to the next generation.

We can get really good at talking about our days. We also get really good at knowing which version of the story belongs where.

Sometimes we are scanning the person listening while we're talking:

You may be able to describe exactly what happened and still feel it somewhere words haven't reached. Because some experiences aren't stored as a story.

Something you know happened but cannot put neatly into a sentence.

For some of this, there simply aren't words in any language.

And that matters here.

The work I offer isn't built around dissecting every detail of what happened or requiring you to tell me things you don't want to tell me.

Sometimes you may want a witness. Someone who can stay with you while you finally put words around something you've carried alone.

Other times, you may want as much privacy as possible. We can work that way, too.

You decide how much of the content you share. I can guide the therapeutic process without needing every detail of the experience.

The goal is not for me to know the whole story. The goal is to help your nervous system process what it learned during what you lived through.

To help an experience that may still feel present even though it happened in the past begin to become something that happened then. To help your system recognize what belongs to the present and what belongs to the past.

To help you keep what is yours:

And begin putting down what you no longer need to carry.

Sometimes that also means recognizing that some of what you have been carrying was never yours to carry in the first place.

If it helps to know more about who I am, that page is there whenever you want it.

Sex requires something that can be surprisingly difficult after years of staying alert:

Sexual concerns can include:

• Changes in desire.
• Difficulty staying present during sex.
• Erectile difficulties.
• Premature ejaculation.
• Difficulty reaching orgasm.
• Performance anxiety.
• Feeling disconnected from your body.
• Avoiding sex or intimacy.
• Using sex or pornography to regulate stress or escape.
• Changes in intimacy after trauma, injury, medication, deployment, parenthood, betrayal, loss, or relationship strain.

Sometimes the difficulty is not sex itself. It is moving between vigilance and connection. Between control and vulnerability. Between being prepared for what might happen next and being present for what is happening now.

Sexual concerns can also have medical or medication-related causes, and appropriate medical evaluation may be an important part of care.

You can read more about how I work with sexual health, plainly and without shame, on the Sexual Health + Intimacy page. For the relational side, Couples Intensives offer extended time for exactly this kind of work.