Healing begins when we embrace the mystery of life’s terrible richness; healing deepens as we embrace our history, looking squarely behind the curtain of remembrance; healing transforms when we embrace possibility, playing with our waking dreams & our potential. - (GB)

Before becoming a social worker and psychotherapist, I spent six years as a welder, shipfitter, and union Boilermaker at shipyards and construction sites on the West Coast, in the Midwest, and in the South; four years working a 45-acre organic and alternative energy homestead in the deeply rural Missouri Ozarks; and ten years as a paid community organizer and grassroots political activist for social and racial justice in the United States and Central America.

In 1991, I was the Development Director for the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) and responsible for a fundraising staff and charged with raising a large yearly budget. During a ten-day silent meditation retreat of that year, I experienced an epiphany guiding me to work more deeply with individuals to ease pain and help with recovery and growth. After another year finishing my organizing projects following the 1992 U.N.-brokered peace agreement in El Salvador, I left Washington DC and returned to college – spending two years completing my BA in Psychology and then two years in graduate school to earn a Masters of Social Work degree.

For the past 27 years, I’ve worked in Portland, Oregon as a psychotherapist, first working for five years in a variety of community mental health clinics and hospitals treating clients diverse in ethnicity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, gender, age and life circumstances. Since 2002, I have worked full-time in private practice. I also supervise students and new psychotherapists working towards their licensure.

In 2004, I completed two years of advanced post-graduate training in Contemporary Relational Psychoanalysis at Portland’s Northwest Center for Psychoanalysis. I have practiced meditation for thirty years and taught mindfulness meditation to personality disordered patients at intensive outpatient treatment centers.

For 13 years from 2005 to 2018 I was a a co-founder, board member, volunteer provider, and clinical consultant with the Returning Veterans Project, which provides free counseling for returning veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns, and have expertise treating combat veterans for Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) and depression.