An effective counseling relationship requires mutual trust. You will need to be honest with me and you need to know that I can be trusted with that honesty. So, I believe it helps for my clients to get to know me and how I found my way to the counseling profession.

What inspires me to help people heal from addiction and trauma?

I am a recovering sex, love and exercise addict. I know the pain of addiction and trauma intimately.

If we turn back the clock several decades, you would find me graduating from Duke University with a degree in clinical psychology. The next logical step was graduate school but somehow I knew that I was not ready to help people. Something was wrong.

Tennis had been a passion of mine since I was a teenager. I was having success coaching tennis and made that a full time job. It led to careers in health club management, sales management, and eventually, owning a telecommunications brokerage company selling voice and data circuits to businesses.

Along the way, I was married and divorced three times. It took numerous affairs and whole lot of  pain before I decided to seek help. This began my own recovery journey. I had found what it was that was “wrong” so many years ago. I knew that I could help people avoid the pain I had experienced.

Thus began the long journey of going back to school to get the necessary training and experience to open my own practice and help you.

A holistic approach to therapy requires that I look at you as a whole person. Focusing solely on the areas that are currently dysfunctional is only going to “bandaid” the situation. Thus, I will encourage you to look at your body, mind and spirit and to integrate these areas in your life.

I believe that every person has an “inner healer.” Often, all it takes is a jump start to help kick it into gear. (If you doubt this, just watch how your body heals from a cut. If you take care of it…properly cleaning and protecting it, healing is rapid. If you do nothing, leaving it unprotected…constantly pick at the scab, it may never heal).

How do I help you jump start your inner healer to get “unstuck?”

A few things that you might want to know…

• I am a licensed professional counselor (LPC) licensed in both South Carolina and Tennessee
• I am a Certified Sex Addiction Therapist (CSAT)
• I am certified in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)
• I am a certified RRT (Rapid Resolution Therapy) practitioner

These tools and skills are used to help you heal from your traumas and core wounds that may also be keeping you stuck.

And, while every client and situation is unique, I have found that most are struggling in their relationships. As I put together a treatment plan, I regularly use the principles of Experiential Therapy, Imago Therapy and Emotional Focused Therapy (EFT), to help heal damaged relationships.

Today, I am remarried for the fourth time. This marriage is very different. I am in recovery now. My wife has gratefully been part of my journey and she has joined me in therapy for many years to really understand what it means to be unstuck. My life is by no means perfect, but if you want someone who can relate to your pain and who “gets it,” I am your guy.