Counselor. Explorer. Fellow traveler. Crazy cat guy.

My path to this work

I never wanted to be a counselor. Not in a million years. My undergraduate degree is in Environmental Engineering — I wanted to spend my career protecting the Great Lakes, modeling water systems, doing quiet technical work outdoors. I was, by my own admission, the stereotypical engineer: more comfortable with data than with people. It was also a path toward real financial security — engineers make good money, in a stable field. Counselors don’t.

Then my life fell apart. Not in the slow, manageable way — in the kind of way that forces you to get honest or stay stuck. Getting help meant having real conversations for the first time, and something in me that I didn’t know was there woke up. I wanted more of that kind of connection — and I started sensing something larger calling me forward, something I’d come to know as my higher power.

That pull led me to graduate school, where I earned both a Master’s in Counseling and a Master of Divinity — one to learn how to have better conversations with people, the other to deepen my own spiritual life. I fought the direction the whole way. I graduated still planning to return to engineering. I sent out a dozen applications. None of them went anywhere. Meanwhile, the small private practice I’d started almost as a side project kept growing, whether I wanted it to or not.

Letting go of control and trusting that process was terrifying — and it’s been one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done. It took years, and an experience at Onsite Workshops in 2015 — riding horses and doing experiential therapy in Montana’s Bob Marshall Wilderness — before I stopped fighting it. Looking back, that work wasn’t really about horses or wilderness. It was my own wall coming down, brick by brick, revealing more of who I actually was underneath all that armor. That’s where I discovered I had a gift for this kind of embodied, experiential work — and where I finally understood: counseling wasn’t a detour from who I was supposed to be. It was who I’d been becoming the whole time.

The engineering background never really left me, either. It shows up now in how I connect with technical professionals who think the way I used to — I can speak their language, because my brain still works that way too. And in a strange way, I’m still building models. I just use experiential therapy instead of mathematics — helping people understand their interior worlds, dismantle the walls they’ve built, and develop the kind of adaptive resources that mean they no longer need those walls.

A gift from a friend I met at Onsite that year — still on my office wall, still reminding me to trust.

I’ve only looked back a few times.