I am a married, Cis-gendered White male, and I have two sons with my partner of 15 years. I live in Asheville, NC and have been here since late 2007. I grew up in Arizona where I attended Arizona State University (the better known ASU) for mechanical engineering… but by the time I had my degree I knew that I didn’t want to work as an engineer. I had worked at a summer camp so loved the outdoors, and I had friends working at a wilderness therapy program in Utah. I decided to try that out and spent most of the next 4 years working with teens that struggled with a wide range of concerns. After moving to NC, I worked with teens struggling with the same issues, but from a very different socio-economic background, most of them referred by the courts. After two years of that work, I followed the good advice of my mentors and entered the counseling program at Western Carolina University and graduated with a MS in Clinical Counseling in 2012. For the next 6 years, I saw a wide range of clients in many different settings, responding primarily to mental health and substance use crisis situations. The experience was invaluable, and also exhausting, so I moved to office based outpatient work in late 2017, spending 2 years supervising several adult outpatient programs in Haywood County prior to starting my private practice in late 2021. I am so fortunate to have benefited from good mentors throughout my career who have consistently pushed me to learn more about my profession, and about myself, to become a better helper.
