The life that worked no longer fits.
Depth-oriented therapy for adults in significant transition — when the map that got you here doesn't show what comes next.
Free 15-min · In-person Palo Alto or telehealth ·
Life transitions can be chosen or unchosen. Either way, they tend to produce a particular kind of disorientation:
The version of yourself that made sense in the old context no longer quite fits. You don't yet have a replacement.
You're doing all the right things — journaling, talking to people, staying busy — but the deeper question won't resolve.
The transition brings up things that predate it: old questions about who you are, what you want, whether the choices you made were right.
Success has arrived but the satisfaction hasn't. You're in the right life and it feels like someone else's.
The grief for what you're leaving — even if you chose to leave it — is more complicated than you expected.
You've been the person who figures things out. This time, figuring isn't working.
Erik Erikson described the central challenge of midlife as generativity versus stagnation — the question of what one's life is actually for. This question, wherever it arrives, is not a crisis to be resolved. It is an invitation. The old identity — built around roles, achievements, the expectations of others — is being asked to make room for something more essential.
Depth-oriented therapy doesn't try to fast-track you to the next chapter. It slows down the transition long enough to ask what it's actually asking. The disorientation of transition contains information about who you have been, and what you have been protecting yourself from wanting.
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
— Mary OliverLife transitions are the moments when this question stops being rhetorical. They ask for a real answer. That is the work.
This is the orientation of depth-oriented therapy: not to fix, manage, or optimize — but to understand what has been organized inside, and make contact with it.
Life transition work is less about problem-solving than about deepening contact with yourself — with what you actually value, what you have been avoiding, and what kind of person you want to become in the next chapter. I bring a depth-psychological frame to this work: attending to dreams, to what activates and what goes flat, to the body's wisdom alongside the mind's.
Less dependent on role and achievement. More grounded in values, desire, and genuine connection to your own life.
Not just the next job or relationship, but a life that is more consciously chosen — less organized around what was expected of you.
Transitions surface old material. Working through it in this context means it doesn't organize your next chapter invisibly.
A real conversation — not a form. Low-pressure, no commitment.
An unhurried intake. Your history, what brings you here, how you make sense of things.
Regular 50-minute sessions, in-person in Palo Alto or via telehealth throughout California.
This is one of the areas I work with in individual therapy.
How individual therapy works →
My own path to this work involved a significant transition — from a long career in leadership to becoming a therapist. I know from the inside what it is to move between identities: the disorientation, the loss of the familiar self, the slow work of finding out what remains when the role falls away.
Full BiographyOther Areas of Focus
Coaching works toward a goal; therapy works toward understanding. Both have value, but depth-oriented therapy goes into material that coaching typically doesn't: the emotional roots, the early patterns, the parts of yourself that organized around protection. If the transition is surfacing deeper questions, therapy is usually the better container.
Yes. The pain of a life that doesn't fit — even a successful, stable one — is real. The question of whether you are actually living your life is one of the most significant a person can ask.
Not at all. Some of the most meaningful work happens in the in-between — when the old chapter has ended and the new one hasn't yet taken shape.
Yes — in-network with Aetna, Wellfleet, and Stanford SHIP. Superbills for other PPO plans.
Transition work often has a natural arc of 6–12 months, though some people choose to continue longer as the work deepens beyond the presenting transition.
Life Transitions · Palo Alto
A free 15-minute consultation is a good place to begin.
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