Better-relationships

MY STORY

My life has always pointed me to counseling. I’ve had a fascination about relationships for as long as I can remember. Always wanting to understand the minutia of interactions, how to connect better through conflict, and to have more sanity than is normal, while being totally authentic at the same time.

My father passed away when I was a teenager, it was devastating for me. He had gotten sick well before he died, but no 16/17 year old boy believes their father can actually die, he was superhuman to me. After he died I was very angry and lost. The relationship between us was very supportive and I noticed all too clearly that it was gone forever. The experience was so overwhelming. I blamed the hospital, him, the universe for taking him away so unexpectedly. I still needed him, I had things left to say, I had questions to ask. Who else save my mother could I trust more than him? What a raw deal. The feeling of this important connection was gone forever.

I had lots of intrusive thoughts about all this, and it was tough to ignore them. I was in my final couple years of high school, and I had very difficult time focusing on school. I had lost some sense of meaning, and needed professional help. 

My mother and extended family wisely turned me towards a grief counselor. I engaged in therapy regularly for the next two years. My therapist skillfully guided me through all the layers and facets that came up in association with the death of my father. With time, and gradual acceptance of these changes, including finding the courage and curiosity to redefine my worldview, I found my way through the grief. 

I quickly learned that psychotherapy was also a path towards a greater realization of myself, and my deepest potentials. There was something so practical, and powerful about psychology. It made sense out of what everybody was feeling, but no one knew how to talk about.

What are we supposed to do with these kinds of overwhelming experiences? 

How do we actually digest them, grow, and live a life of deep satisfaction?

The medium of counseling helped me learn how to speak honestly about what I thought and felt, while understanding my issues in a larger context, and helped me see that I was not alone, or somehow deeply at fault in my life.

Therapy showed me how to hold the dark parts of myself, metabolize them, understand them, and return to highest values. To be the person I really wanted to be. To re-claim responsibility and my intentions, ultimately my personal power over my life. It allowed me to stop blaming.

Over the next 15 years I studied just about every spirituality, psychology, and personal growth book I could get my hands on. I traveled to Asia to learn how to meditate. I lived in Esalen Institute in California for two years where I did 26 different workshops and trainings. I met, walked, and talked with some of the best growth experts in the world. Had new love affairs, worked on my shadow, and generally just began to take on the world. 

Eventually I moved to Boulder, Colorado to begin my undergraduate degree in Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology. I began working for Boulder Mental Health Partners half way through my degree, and started professionally counseling both kids and adults in 2009. I eventually began a Masters program in Counseling Psychology at Regis University. Got married, and had my first child. 

Working in community mental health was incredibly draining for me, it paid poorly, strayed from the philosophies I preferred, and most of all I saw the system did not effect real change in the people I saw. I decided in 2015 to leave MHP and open my own practice. 

I’ve learned a tremendous amount around being a business owner since, and have been grateful to have served as many people as I have in my office. However, I have been all to aware of the need to specialize. To have a niche, to live, breathe, study one specific area, and serve my clients from this specialty. 

In 2019 my marriage fell apart. I have left out this part of my story to emphasize how painful and how much growth this piece has generated for me. 

There is no experience in my life that has been more painful than loosing my marriage. And if I look back on it, all of my most difficult experiences have come from loosing nourishing relationships. Whether it was loosing my father as a teenager, loosing the few serious girlfriends I’ve had since high school, drifting from childhood friends, and certainly departing from my wife, and loosing contact with my daughter everyday. There’s nothing I am more affected by than my relationships. Nothing gives more joy and pleasure, and nothing makes me more reactive, or more triggered than my relationships. 

When my marriage ended, I put a lot in to question. How do healthy long term relationships work? What is unconditional love? Did I know it? How can long term relationships not only be healthy, but be inspired, sexy, and truly connected? What programming do we have around it? How do real relationships actually make it? How do they actually thrive?

Through my healing process I have been motivated to understand what makes healthy relationships thrive. I researched everything from attachment, to neurobiology, to polyamory, spirituality, values-driven approaches, and depth psychology. Finally through my own struggle and determination for clarity, research and experimentation, I saw the vision for better relationships work.

MY EXPERIENCE