I spent my early summers in my grandmother’s tiny Ohio river town, where the highlight was always the library. I’d haul stacks of books back to her house—suspense novels with fierce female protagonists alongside dense psychology texts. Together, they began answering questions I couldn’t stop asking: How do we become who we are? What shapes our struggles, our relationships, our capacity to change?

The stories enveloped me; the science intrigued me. I was hooked, heart and mind.

I started college studying journalism because I wanted to tell people’s stories. Eventually, I realized I was even more interested in what lived underneath them. I added psychology and women’s studies, worked in trauma research, and ultimately became a clinical psychologist.

Over the two decades since, I’ve worked with people across nearly every level of mental health care. Today, I work primarily with individuals and couples, often people who are thoughtful, psychologically minded, and quite good at understanding themselves—but have discovered that insight alone doesn’t change everything.

People come to me for many reasons: anxiety and self-criticism, trauma and difficult early relationships, identity transitions, relationship struggles, or simply the sense that old ways of coping no longer fit the life they want to live. My work is active, relational, and emotionally focused. I’m interested not only in the stories we tell about ourselves, but in what’s happening underneath them—the feelings we move away from, the ways we’ve learned to protect ourselves, and the patterns that quietly repeat in our relationships.

I believe therapy can offer something beyond understanding why we are the way we are. At its best, it creates opportunities to experience ourselves and other people differently.

That same idea guides my work with couples. I’m interested in what lives beneath the argument: the protection, fear, resentment, and disconnection that can leave two people caught in the same painful dance. Together, we slow those patterns down and work toward ways of relating that feel more honest, connected, and alive.

I’m also interested in approaches to healing that reach beyond intellect alone, including contemplative and body-based practices and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. I’m particularly interested in how these experiences, when approached thoughtfully and integrated well, can create openings for meaningful psychological change.

In 2018, I founded Galia Collaborative to create the kind of mental health practice I wanted to exist: one that brings depth, curiosity, and humanity to clinical care. Today, my work takes several forms. I’m a psychologist, writer, teacher, speaker, and founder, but across all of them I’m still following essentially the same questions that drew me to those stacks of books years ago.

When I’m not working or caring for my big blended family, you’ll usually find me reading, writing, hiking, or listening to live music.