Why this Blog Exists
So much of the work I do, whether in the consulting room, teaching, writing, or public conversations, lives in layers. It exists in contradiction, ambivalence, fantasy, conflict, longing, avoidance, repetition, and meaning. It does not always fit cleanly into short-form language and rarely resolves into simple advice. And often, what matters most is not the obvious question on the surface, but the one underneath it.
This blog is a place for those underneath questions.
It is a space where I will be writing more fully about sex, intimacy, relationships, betrayal, desire, conflict, emotional life, and the unconscious forces that shape the ways we attach, defend, pursue, withdraw, eroticize, and suffer. It is also a place where I can think in a more spacious way about the themes that run through my clinical work and writing again and again: the tension between closeness and freedom, the persistence of old relational templates, the complexity of erotic life, the meanings carried by symptoms, and the difficult, often painful gap between what we consciously believe and what we unconsciously repeat.
If you know me already from my therapy practice, my book, a training, a talk, a podcast, or social media, you probably know that I am not especially interested in tidy answers. I am interested in the emotional logic of things. I am interested in what makes people feel stuck in the same painful patterns even when they are trying desperately to do something different. I am interested in what gets split off, defended against, sexualized, disavowed, or enacted.
I am interested in the ways our earliest relational worlds continue to live inside us, shaping what we experience as exciting, unbearable, dangerous, necessary, shameful, or familiar.
Some posts will be grounded in clinical and psychoanalytic thinking. Others will be more personal, cultural, or reflective. Some will speak directly to people trying to make better sense of their relationships, their erotic lives, or their internal conflicts. Others will be written with therapists and clinicians in mind. Most, I imagine, will speak to both, because the questions that animate therapy are not only clinical questions. They are human ones.
I have always believed that people are helped not only by insight, but by finally finding words for something they have lived but have never fully named. Sometimes that naming is clarifying and deeply relieving. Sometimes it is destabilizing at first, because it brings us closer to truths we have spent a long time defending against. Still, even then, there can be something profoundly freeing about seeing more clearly.
This blog is a place for thoughtfulness, complexity, and recognition where desire can be discussed without cliché, conflict can be understood beyond communication tips, betrayal can be held in its full emotional depth, and symptoms can be approached not as random malfunctions, but as meaningful expressions of psychic life.
I also hope it feels personal in the best sense. Not confessional, but alive. This work matters deeply to me. The questions I write about here are not abstract ones. They are questions I have spent years living with, thinking about, listening for, and returning to. They emerge from the privilege of sitting with people as they try to understand themselves more honestly and love more truthfully as well as my own long-standing fascination with the ways intimacy can console us, expose us, organize us, and undo us.
There is so much more to say than can fit in a caption and more depth available than our culture often makes room for. This blog is my way of making that room. I’m very glad you’re here.
