My path to becoming a clinical psychologist at age fifty-three, a spiritual teacher, and an author was not a linear academic march. It was a fierce, somatic rescue mission for my own soul.

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The Braced Child

My early life was defined by a landscape of quiet vigilance. Growing up in Ann Arbor on Esch Court, our colonial home was outwardly beautiful, but internally shaped by what I call the “atmosphere of anticipation.” My youngest brother, Charlie, was severely autistic. In a household where a sudden, high-pitched scream could shatter the silence at any moment, my nervous system learned to live in a state of constant, protective bracing.

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Because of early childhood debridement trauma from severe physical burns, those sensory triggers cut deep into my physical body. I learned to survive by becoming the "good kid"—the one who anticipated everyone’s needs, mediated family storms, and quietly learned to disappear. I became an expert at living from the neck up, carrying my family's weight while my own physical self remained tightly bound, holding its breath.

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The Collapse and the Exile​​

By my early thirties, the structural bracing of my childhood began to fail. In 1991, living in a co-op, I collapsed into a profound, suffocating depression. The survival strategies of my youth—pleasing others, intellectualizing my feelings, and maintaining an outer mask of competence—no longer worked.

I was forced into a period of conscious exile. I took a two-year hiatus from my family to quiet the external noise and listen, for the first time, to the quiet stirrings of my own body.

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During this dark night of the soul, I experienced a quiet, revolutionary breakthrough. I call it natural initiation. One afternoon, standing at the kitchen sink, I realized I was doing the dishes not out of a heavy sense of obligation or "I must," but out of a simple, organic, somatic desire: "I want clean dishes." It was the first time in my life that action flowed from a genuine internal want rather than an external should. This small, cellular shift permanently reordered my life. It was the birth of my sovereign self.

The Path of Awakening

My healing journey soon led me to the tools that would define my life's work. At twenty-seven, I met my lifelong friend Marcia, who introduced me to meditation and the ancient mantra Om Namah Shivaya—"I honor my inner self." For a woman who had lived with a background of quiet self-rejection, this practice was a cool rain on dry soil.

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Later, resolved to understand the energetic dimensions of our holding patterns, I attended the Barbara Brennan School of Healing (BBSH). The first year was excruciating; I cried on every single drive from Michigan to New York. Yet, my body knew I had to be there. Meeting Barbara, who looked at me and said simply, "I can tell," validated a lifelong sensitivity to energy that I had long dismissed. By graduation, her acknowledgment of my "extraordinary vision" and "spectacular healing" resolved a lifetime of seeking external mirrors, grounding me in my own intuitive authority.

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Finally, training deeply with Judith Blackstone to become a Senior Teacher of the Realization Process, I found the ultimate integration of psychology and spirit. I learned how to inhabit the internal space of the body—tissues, cells, and bones—as a unified field of fundamental consciousness.

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Integrating Science and Spirit

At age fifty-three, I brought these decades of lived somatic wisdom into academia, earning my Doctorate in Clinical Psychology. My qualitative research (focused on the "silent suffering" and long-term well-being of adult siblings of autistic individuals) became the empirical spine of my upcoming hybrid memoir, Shadow of the Spectrum.

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Today, my work is a seamless integration of these worlds. I do not see you through the lens of clinical pathology. I see you as a whole, sovereign being who has simply learned to brace against life.

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Whether we work together through somatic psychotherapy, the embodiment practices of the Realization Process, or through the pages of my writing, my goal is to help you let go of the heavy curtains of your past, unbind your physical holding patterns, and step into the warm, luminous center of your own life.