Personal Statement

I believe that life is a journey, and that it is primarily a journey towards enhancing our own capacity for intimacy with ourselves, with others, with the Earth, and with the Great Spirit of the Universe. Counseling, if experienced by the client as an I-Thou relation, offers the opportunity to progress in one's capacity for such intimacy.

My work, Enlightened Care, is designed to provide an I-Thou relation that will offer clients (individuals, couples, and/or families) the capacity to enhance their capacity for such intimacy. All DSM-5 "disorders" represent ways in which people may have habitually avoided intimacy in their lives. There are good reasons why most every one of us have learned particular ways of avoiding intimacy in our lives.

Each of us have always done the best we could at each moment to cope with sometimes impossible circumstances. Counseling, at its best, offers an environment to clients maximally conducive to diminishing and eliminating such habitual ways of avoiding intimacy. Ironically, though, the path to intimacy is profound respect for our habits of intimacy-avoidance.